Lions Gate’s $100 Million Yonkers Deal Highlights New Tax Break

Film companies are famous for chasing government subsidies across the globe. Now a few of them have latched on to a generous new federal benefit for investing in lower-income U.S. communities.

Lions Gate Entertainment Corp., the studio behind “Orange Is the New Black,” struck a deal Sept. 5 to build a new $100 million-plus production facility in Yonkers, north of New York, its first in the U.S. The development sits inside an “opportunity zone,” which will enable the company and its partners to reap significant tax breaks on capital gains.

The incentives—touted as the biggest effort in a generation to ...