Why Movie Producer Alexis Garcia Ditched Hollywood for Miami

On a Tuesday evening in May, in front of a packed house at the University of Miami’s Cosford Cinema, Miami film producer Alexis Garcia introduced a sneak preview of his latest movie. Friendship, the new absurdist comedy starring Saturday Night Live alum Tim Robinson and directed by Andrew DeYoung, in which an awkward suburban dad (Robinson) becomes infatuated with his cool new neighbor (Paul Rudd), was set to debut locally the following week after a limited release in New York and Los Angeles.

This was no ordinary screening, however. Festive pop music played during the preshow, making the atmosphere feel more like a party than a typical movie night. Subway sandwiches were served to the audience, a tie-in with one of the film’s gags. Before the film started, local media personalities, including Mike Ryan Ruiz of the Dan Le Batard Show and influencer Matt "Supes" Ramos, interacted with the audience and told jokes peppered with local references.

Local Cuban-American actor Ruben Rabasa — whose appearance in a sketch from Robinson’s Netflix show, I Think You Should Leave, went viral some years ago — also made a memorable cameo at the screening. Garcia played the sketch for the crowd before the movie to introduce Robinson’s odd style of humor before bringing out Rabasa to deepen the audience’s connection to the film they were about to see. When it came time to screen the movie, the crowd was ready to laugh along all the way through.
Garcia, himself the son of Cuban immigrants, grew up in Kendall, where a childhood infatuation with performing arts evolved into an interest in show business. After directing plays in high school at Westminster Christian and in college at Vanderbilt, he earned a law degree from UCLA and spent the next few years cycling between various legal and executive roles in Hollywood, including at major talent agency William Morris Endeavor and as head of film at prolific studio Fifth Season, formerly Endeavor Content. Some prominent movies he’s had a hand in include the stylish Ryan Gosling thriller Drive, the Michael Bay-directed heist movie Ambulance, and even auteur Yorgos Lanthimos’ historical drama the Favourite.

Garcia’s intent with the Friendship screening wasn’t just to promote the film, on which he served as an executive producer. He also wanted to prove that this weird indie comedy could be viable in a place like Miami, which is still considered niche by Hollywood studios and marketing teams.

"They still only think of this region as being Spanish-speaking heavy, or Latino-heavy, and it’s always going to be heavy on that front," he says. "But that doesn't factor in all the New Yorkers and Chicagoans and Bay Area people that have moved here over the last several years."

The COVID-19 pandemic only accelerated those migrations, and it was precisely this seismic event that spurred Garcia to make a change. COVID set production and release schedules back by years and emptied theaters; more than 2,000 screens were permanently shuttered in its wake, according to the Hollywood Reporter. With most work being done remotely and fewer practical reasons to stay in Los Angeles, he decided to move himself and his family back to Miami.

In a way, the move is part of a larger trend of dispersal in the industry. COVID accelerated a years-long industry exodus from Hollywood’s traditional home in Los Angeles. A recent story in New York magazine described how tax incentives in places such as Georgia, Vancouver, and Budapest have led productions to largely abandon California due to costs.

A similar program existed in Florida until 2017, when the state government canceled it. The move effectively killed the state’s thriving film and TV industry and led to an exodus of productions to surrounding states. Once, the city hosted the likes of Miami Vice and Bad Boys; nowadays, even films set in Florida are made elsewhere. The Oscar-nominated 2024 drama Nickel Boys, for instance, which is set in and around Tallahassee, was largely shot in Louisiana due to tax incentives.

"It made a huge difference," Garcia says of the incentives. "Unlike some of those other regions, people are going to want to shoot here anyway, with or without an incentive, and that tips a lot of things that might not otherwise have tipped here. You might go from shooting one week to establish your setting here to, 'okay, we’ll shoot the whole thing,' or shoot several weeks."

Garcia says the lack of incentives makes local production an uphill climb. But exhibition is a different story — returning to Miami gave him a different perspective on how the rest of the country watches movies.

"I'm surrounded by a different kind of people than I'm used to in LA, consumer-wise, too. When you're in LA, working in the industry, you don't even meet regular consumers, because everybody's in the industry. When I moved to Miami and talked about the movies I've made, no matter how many movies I've made, people have barely seen any of them.”
Cinema in Miami has been through a rough decade on both sides of the screen. In addition to industry-wide pandemic-related issues, the area has seen crucial venues such as Little Havana’s Tower Theater transition away from showing films. But Garcia believes there are ways to reverse the tide. In his mind, crowd-pleasing genres such as action and comedy are the way to go, and to that end, he cofounded the production label CAT5 in 2024, with backing from Fifth Season, in order to make more of them.

"Audiences fell out of the habit of regular movie going," he says. "You're gonna get them back in a habit by giving them things they want to go see."

This is especially true in a region like South Florida, where the general audience is king. One recent release he worked on, the Jason Statham-starring thriller A Working Man, overperformed in the area, with one theater’s box office take for the film scoring in the top 10 nationally. Another actioner, the Taron Edgerton-starring She Rides Shotgun, dropped earlier this month and scored positive reviews, although its theatrical release was truncated.

"This is a major, major market," says Garcia. "It’s in the upper echelons of (cinema) markets in America, and I think has only become more so as the population down here has evolved."

Friendship is available on Blu-Ray and PVOD and will stream on HBO Max later this year.