Kockroach Wraps in Sydney as NSW Banks Another Hollywood Shoot

Kockroach, the 1950s New York crime thriller starring Chris Hemsworth, Taron Egerton and Zazie Beetz, wrapped principal photography in Sydney after a seven-week shoot. None of it was filmed in New York. The whole period production, marquee names included, was built and shot across the state of New South Wales.

Behind the star wattage sits a quieter story about money and geography. Kockroach joins a growing line of big-budget Hollywood projects choosing Australia over a Los Angeles soundstage, and the state that hosted it has already put a number on what the visit was worth.

Seven Weeks in Sydney, Then a Wrap

Principal photography ran roughly seven weeks across Sydney and greater New South Wales (NSW), wrapping on May 31. Director Matt Ross, the actor turned filmmaker behind Captain Fantastic, helmed the project from a screenplay by Jonathan Ames, the writer of You Were Never Really Here, with revisions of his own. Hemsworth confirmed the wrap on Instagram, calling the shoot “quite possibly the most fun” he had had on a set.

The film follows a mysterious stranger out of New York’s criminal underworld who claws his way up the ladder into a larger-than-life crime boss in a city run on raw power. Taron Egerton, the Welsh actor known for Rocketman, and Zazie Beetz, of Atlanta and Joker, share top billing. Production designers leaned hard into the era, staging a cinema sequence built around a screening of the 1957 courtroom classic 12 Angry Men.

The shoot was a home-state job for an actor who has spent the past couple of years working abroad, including his return as Tyler Rake in Extraction 3. This time the studio brought the work to him, and to several hundred Australian crew who never had to leave home.

What NSW Banked From the Shoot

The state attached hard figures to the production. Hosting the picture pumped about A$37 million (around US$24 million) into the NSW economy and engaged more than 600 cast and crew, with support flowing through Screen NSW’s Made in NSW Fund. Those numbers are the reason a film set in mid-century Manhattan ended up being made on the other side of the planet.

• A$37 million added to the New South Wales economy
• 600+ local cast and crew engaged on the production
• Roughly seven weeks of principal photography across Sydney and regional NSW
• Made in NSW Fund backing, stacked on top of the national rebate

State cash alone does not move a project of this size. It works because it sits on top of a federal scheme. Producers can layer a state fund like Made in NSW onto Canberra’s national rebate, and the combined return is what tips the spreadsheet. The federal incentives backing NSW productions are designed to be combined exactly this way.

Australia’s Quiet Production Boom

The centrepiece of the pitch is a 30% Location Offset, the headline tax rebate for large-budget film and television shot in Australia. Legislated in July 2024, it pays back nearly a third of qualifying spend once a project clears a A$20 million floor of QAPE (Qualifying Australian Production Expenditure, the local money a production actually spends). You can read the fine print on Australia’s 30% Location Offset rebate.

The receipts are stacking up. Australia logged a record A$1.93 billion of production spend across 174 local and international titles in 2024/25, a 14% jump on the prior year, according to figures tracking record national production spend. Kockroach is one more line in that ledger.

The flip side of the boom is geographic. Every shoot that lands in Sydney is one that did not light up a stage in Burbank, and the drift has become a sore point back home, captured in stories about the exodus of productions from Los Angeles. The win is real for Australian crews. The bill is being paid somewhere else.

Why Australia keeps winning is not complicated. The country offers deep, experienced crews, modern soundstages, a favourable exchange rate against the US dollar, and an English-language workforce that needs no translation for an American period piece. Add a third of the budget back at the end, and the math gets hard to argue with.

A Cockroach in a Gray Flannel Suit

The title is not a typo, and the story is stranger than the crime-boss logline suggests. Kockroach is adapted from a 2007 novel by William Lashner, published under the pen name Tyler Knox, and it is a deliberate flip of Franz Kafka’s 1915 novella The Metamorphosis.

Where Kafka turned the man Gregor Samsa into an insect, the book runs the trick in reverse. A cockroach wakes up in a seedy Times Square hotel in the mid-1950s and finds it has become a man, then sets about doing what cockroaches do best, which is survive and multiply, only now in the form of a rising underworld kingpin.

That premise is what keeps the film from being a standard gangster picture. The adaptation reportedly preserves a supernatural element drawn from the source, which means Hemsworth is playing something closer to a fable than a biopic. It is an unusual swing for a star better known for swinging a hammer, and it explains why Ross, a director with an indie sensibility, was the one steering it.

The Roles That Changed Hands

The version that wrapped is not the version first announced. When the project surfaced in 2025, the two lead roles were attached to different actors entirely, and both fell away to scheduling before cameras rolled. The reshuffle reads cleanly when laid side by side.

Around the new leads the ensemble filled out with familiar names. Alec Baldwin, Rachel Sennott and Brian Geraghty all signed on across the spring, rounding out a cast that mixes blockbuster wattage with character-actor weight.

The Crew Stamps Behind the Camera

The names below the title may matter more to the finished film than the cast turnover. Ross assembled a department-head roster with serious pedigree, much of it tied to the kind of visually muscular work the source material demands.

• Colin Gibson, production designer, an Academy Award winner for Mad Max: Fury Road
• Adam Arkapaw, cinematographer, known for the first season of True Detective
• Jonathan Dearing, visual effects (VFX) supervisor, who worked on The Invisible Man

On the producing side, Andrew Lazar and Christina Weiss Lurie steered the project, with Black Bear Pictures and Mad Chance behind it. Black Bear has built a reputation backing star-driven adult dramas, and Kockroach fits the pattern on Black Bear Pictures’ production slate.

No release date is locked, though the film is expected to surface in late 2026 or early 2027 once post-production and visual effects work is finished. That window leaves room for a festival debut before any wide rollout.

Kockroach has no date on the calendar yet. For the crews who rebuilt 1950s Manhattan in New South Wales, the number that mattered was banked the day filming wrapped.