Hooters: The Movie Heads to Tampa and Clearwater for November 2026 Shoot

The origin story of one of America's most recognizable restaurant chains is heading to the big screen, and the production team behind it is building toward a November 2026 start in the Tampa Bay area of Florida. Hooters: The Movie is currently in pre-production as an independent feature film, giving crew members, location professionals, and department heads in the region a significant lead time to get connected with what promises to be a uniquely Florida-rooted production with a built-in national audience for its subject matter.

The film follows Ted and Lenny, two lifelong friends from Iowa whose road trip to Clearwater Beach in search of a woman named Diane leads, through a series of apparently accidental turns, to the founding of the Hooters restaurant empire. The story also involves pressure from the federal government, adding a layer of conflict to what might otherwise read as a simple entrepreneurial comedy. The screenplay comes from a trio of writers: Ed Droste, Phil Olson, and Chuck Melcher, with Droste also serving as a producer on the project. Droste is a founding partner of Hooters himself, which lends the project an unusual and valuable degree of authenticity. When the people who actually lived the story are the ones putting it on screen, the production tends to carry a different energy than a purely commercial biopic assembled from the outside. Jon Rosenbaum is attached to direct, and while he is not a household name in terms of high-profile studio credits, his involvement here appears to stem directly from his connection to the Hooters founding circle rather than from a traditional development pipeline.

The production is being driven by members of the original Hooters founding partners, which makes this a genuinely independent feature in the truest sense. This is not a studio project with a streamer acquisition deal already baked in. It is a founder-led passion project with real financial and creative skin in the game from the people whose story it tells. That context matters for crew assessing the gig. Independent productions of this kind can be enormously rewarding to work on, with a tight-knit creative culture and decision-makers who are accessible and genuinely invested. Budget scale will be worth confirming as the project moves through pre-production, but the involvement of multiple founding partners as producers suggests meaningful private backing rather than a shoestring operation.

Filming is scheduled to take place primarily in the Tampa and Clearwater, Florida area, which is not only a logical narrative choice but a smart production one. The original Hooters restaurant opened on Clearwater Beach in 1983, so the locations carry genuine historical weight for this story. Florida has steadily grown its film production infrastructure over the past decade, and the Tampa Bay region in particular has become a viable base for independent features and television alike. The area offers a range of practical locations from beachfront commercial strips to period-appropriate diners and roadside Americana that would serve a 1980s-set story well. Florida does not currently offer the most aggressive tax incentive program compared to Georgia or Louisiana, but the narrative authenticity of shooting where the story actually happened is a powerful argument for staying in state, and local crew depth in the Tampa Bay corridor has grown considerably. Productions based in this area typically pull from a solid pool of Florida-based crew while also attracting department heads who relocate from Atlanta, Miami, or New York for the duration.

With a November 2026 production start, this film is still well over a year out from rolling cameras, which means the hiring pipeline is in its earliest stages. Department heads in art, locations, costume, and camera are likely not yet locked, and the production is almost certainly still assembling its full producing team and financing structure. For crew in the Florida market, now is exactly the right time to make contact and express interest, well before the competition intensifies as the start date draws closer. The period setting of the early 1980s will have meaningful implications for the art and costume departments in particular, as recreating the look of pre-chain Clearwater Beach requires research, resourcefulness, and a strong eye for the era. A locations department with deep roots in the Tampa Bay area will be essential to finding the right practical settings. Given the genre blend of road-trip comedy, entrepreneurial origin story, and government-pressure drama, the production will benefit from a versatile crew comfortable shifting tone across scenes.

ProductionList.com will keep this listing updated as Hooters: The Movie moves through pre-production and begins confirming department heads, production contacts, and office locations in the Tampa area. If you are a working professional in Florida or a department head considering a relocation for a late 2026 feature, this is the right moment to bookmark the full listing and follow the production's progress. The complete crew list, production office details, and contact information will be added to the listing as they are confirmed, so check back regularly as the project advances toward its cameras-up date.

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