Spending on homegrown film and TV in Ontario jumped 15% to $549.4 million last year, while the cash brought in by foreign films continued a downward slide, according to a recent report from the Ontario Media Development Corporation.

‘For domestic, we’re obviously very pleased,’ Donna Zuchlinski, acting director of industry development at OMDC, tells Playback Daily.

Homegrown features were up 5%, which Zuchlinski attributes to projects such as Away from Her, How She Move and Weirdsville.

But the picture is less rosy on the foreign side, which saw a 26% drop in total spending to $338.7 million. Features saw the largest drop, down by roughly one-third to $218 million.

Zuchlinksi blames strong competition from other territories including B.C., which last year hosted a number of Hollywood titles including A Night at the Museum, Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer and Alien vs. Predator 2.

Foreign MOWs and miniseries were also down, though series spending jumped 23% to $75.2 million.

Meanwhile, the northern B.C. film commission released its numbers for 2006, signaling a more modest year with $360,000 in overall production income, down from $11 million in 2005.

The numbers for ’05 were inflated by the presence of the Disney picture Eight Below, notes film commissioner Karen Cameron. ‘Eight Below was the big feature that gave us a great year in 2005,’ she says.

Numbers for the province as a whole have not yet been released.