SXSW 2025: Tapping Into Texas’s Vast Potential to Become the Next Cinematic Frontier

This year’s SXSW film festival in Austin blew into town with a considerable tailwind of enthusiasm for the Lone Star state’s film and TV future. Every state in the union can claim unique cultures, geographies, and mythologies, but there’s no disputing that Texas looms very large in our collective cultural imagination. It’s a state that takes very seriously the notion that it’s really a country.

Texas’s hold on our imagination is evident in how many great films and TV series are set there (whether they’re actually filmed there or not—we’ll get to that in a second),

From Ranch to Rodeo to Rig: How the Hair on “Yellowstone” & “Landman” Tells the Story

The season finale of Yellowstone, the modern-day Western saga that became a cultural touchstone, aired in December. Audiences didn’t have to wait long for creator Taylor Sheridan’s next project, Landman, the first season of which was released even before Yellowstone bowed on Paramount+. Billy Bob Thornton stars as Tommy Norris, a West Texas oil company operations manager (or landman), who, over the course of a single week,