Hollywood’s Post-COVID Production Dilemma: Buy Pricey Insurance or Roll the Dice?

As the supply of coronavirus vaccinations expands and film and TV productions ramp up again, studios and production companies are faced with a critical decision: Insure or don’t insure their projects. With pandemics now excluded on standard insurance policies, productions have three options to get their projects moving, according to production insurance experts: 1) Pay higher premiums and deductibles to the few specialty insurance companies that cover losses, 2) self-insure, or 3) get no insurance and take the risk. Adding to the higher costs, projects need a COVID compliance officer, as well as other protective measures, such as PPE and testing options, which can increase budgets by up to 20%. “There is a new game in town, and we have to play it,” Joe Addison, managing director at Marsh, an insurance broker and risk advisory firm, told TheWrap. “You can follow the protocol, but there is no guarantee and that’s why insurance companies can’t get their arm around it — they write things they don’t understand or you have companies that will exclude stuff that they do understand. The studios have said, ‘Guess what? We need to make content, and it’s more important than the cost of potentially shutting down.’...

Read original story Hollywood’s Post-COVID Production Dilemma: Buy Pricey Insurance or Roll the Dice? At TheWrap