13 ms·

How Hollywood stopped making movies in Hollywood

225 points by speckx 3mo ago

oliculipolicula 3mo ago
>For studio executives, it means making do with smaller crews, outsourcing production overseas, and, eventually, using AI to replace some human labor. Ah so this might be how "shorter working hours" looks on the ground. "Leisure and Culture"'s share of the pie has actually shrunk abit: https://archive.md/2026.06.04-075622/https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jun/04/world-inequality-lab-equality-academics-planetary-survival#:~:text=Share%20of%20global%20economic%20labour%20hours%20by%20sector%2C%20%25 https://archive.md/2026.06.04-075622/https://www.theguardian... That's world, not US, so it might also be that foreign production teams are not counted as "leisure and culture" in their own jurisdictions lol Original pdf here, p11 https://globaljusticeproject.wid.world/www-site/uploads/2026/06/GlobalJusticeReport_WebsiteVersion.pdf https://globaljusticeproject.wid.world/www-site/uploads/2026...
aprilthird2021 3mo ago
I wonder if this will change as Hollywood is eyeing three $1B+ box office earners back to back to back this summer
- epolanski 3mo ago
  Unlikely. Money is money, and if you can film in UK where you get tax incentives and lower costs there's no reason to film in Hollywood.
  - aprilthird2021 3mo ago
    Could say the same about filming on IMAX, refusing to use CGI, various cost cutting measures taken by cheaper looking Netflix movies. Idk, the need to worry about cost fluctuates with how much you make. That's also true
- laidoffamazon 3mo ago
  But weren't they all made outside of Hollywood? Emeryville, around Europe and the UK, and then the UK for Toy Story 5, Odyssey, and Spiderman respectively?
  - asdff 3mo ago
    A decent amount of odyssey was actually filmed on the universal backlot
    - gedy 3mo ago
      Which is cool, but also likely an outlier due to Christopher Nolan's usage of practical effects vs CGI. His clout probably helped with the funding of that tbh.
      - asdff 3mo ago
        They are still building new soundstages as we speak.
  - aprilthird2021 3mo ago
    Sure but I meant now they are making more than before they might not be as cost sensitive going forward
vrosas 3mo ago
> For a major blockbuster, tax incentives equate to tens of millions of dollars, freeing up money for name-brand actors, elaborate set pieces, and unremarkable CGI effects. Love the dig at the end.
- heresie-dabord 3mo ago
  To paraphrase Syndrome [0]: When everything is a explosion, then nothing will be an explosion. [0] _ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_The_Incredibles_characters#Syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_The_Incredibles_charac...
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
bsenftner 3mo ago
I worked in Los Angeles doing animation and VFX software for 33 years, and left 5 years ago as the cost of living there made no sense, and my prospects for work became nomadic global chasing of work now taking place in countries with no or ignored labor laws. (As if labor laws are respected in the US anyway.) Interesting in relation to the article, the author describes working out of the empty Warner Bros. lot; I lived across the street, right next to "The Starlite" (the author will recognize.) Los Angeles and the entertainment industry's economics are brutal. My wife is exponentially more successful than I, a film she was the VFX producer for won an Oscar, she's an industry player, and still LA is too expensive.
- intheitmines 3mo ago
  Super interesting, do you feel this is death by 1000 cuts or can you point at the economics no longer working as small handful of causes (i.e. rise of cost of living in LA, move towards direct to streaming rather than theater releases, AI workflows)?
  - bsenftner 3mo ago
    I think the economics of a global entertainment and wealthy persons' playground is what is "ruining" Los Angeles. Earlier in my time there, I spent time in an uber-wealthy circle and basically encountered Epstein-class people doing what they do with the children of their own staff, and that is when I noped out of that entire social circle. There is not much that can be done when you see such wealth pursuing such agendas and you also see them with celebrities, as well as senior city and state officials. Such people are untouchable as far as the law is concerned. Los Angeles is sick with treating others as disposable, with sexual aspects included. And it is not "Los Angeles", this is human nature without boundaries.
    - preommr 3mo ago
      > encountered Epstein-class people doing what they do with the children of their own staff kind of glossing over something pretty major
- 3mo ago
smallstepforman 3mo ago
In the next decade, AI will be gutting every industry associated with hollywood other than nvidia and tmsc.
ramesh31 3mo ago
>"If this has all drifted into bummertown, it’s because many of Hollywood’s problems can be traced back to a single economic theory of everything: the rent is too damn high. From there, everything else starts to unravel." It's really understated just how much this is behind absolutely everything today. The only reason it became normal for SV software companies to pay 100k+ salaries to interns in the 2010s is because half of that had to be handed over to a landlord every month just to have people physically able to show up to your office. This is why Europe and Asia have completely dominated production of all the great AAA games over the last decade; when creative people can afford to live somewhere, all of the sudden you have the resources to truly focus on a product.
- akurilin 3mo ago
  Cue https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-everything/ https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-every...
- coliveira 3mo ago
  Also, a lot of real estate is owned by the Hollywood investors or their close friends, so this is a circular economy where they get rich, then buy property in that place and get even richer with real estate increasing in value. The same thing happened in Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and many other places.
- pessimizer 3mo ago
  That rent is simply a tax (tribute) paid from people (peasants) to property owners (lords.) It's why people who own capital are the wealthiest that they've ever been in history despite producing nothing and increasingly being of severely subnormal intelligence. The distraction is that a lot of people think that they are property owners who are not. The bank owns your property, you're a tax farmer. The people who own the bank are your bosses. They are granted the right by the state to loan you the money to buy an overvalued property, without actually having the money to loan you, and on the condition that the property that you bought is theirs if you miss a repayment on the money that they loaned you that that they didn't have. This is also why building more housing does not work in the long term to lower rents. We have a surplus of housing, just like we have a surplus of commercial property. But we have arbitrarily changed expectations for the margins of finance capital. The tax farmers (most landlords) are a distraction so that their tiny margins can be pointed at - because the money was made from the property when they purchased it. Now they're behind the 8-ball trying to make the payments, until they lose their job to a better tax farmer. If you build 9000 shitty units at the site of a grocery store, you can raise all of the rents around them because the 9000 shitty units are now an escape valve against displacement and dislocation. The next step is to raise the rents on the 9000 shitty units, by any means necessary, even if it means keeping half of them empty for a decade, and using them to write off your taxes on other properties you own. The fact that there's no grocery store and no parking for 9000 units? Your problem. YIMBY activism is entirely financed by these people, which is why it's so loud.
digitalsurgeonz 3mo ago
Hollywood makes slop now, the last movie I saw was some iteration of Mission Impossible where the genius agent defeats the all powerful AI and that just felt like lack of imagination.
- esafak 3mo ago
  You picked such a commercial movie to make your case. Why not Bugonia, The Odyssey, One Battle After Another, Project Hail Mary, Frankenstein, etc. (all recent)
  - digitalsurgeonz 3mo ago
    omg project hail marry, what a dumb story, they reduced an intelligent life form to a human pet dog.
AlexB138 3mo ago
The article repeatedly mentions how production moved to Atlanta due to tax incentives. Even that is a race to the bottom, as Disney moved production of Marvel movies out of Atlanta last year to the UK where they got better tax incentives. Even the undercutting cities are being undercut.
- noja 3mo ago
  Why though? I thought Hollywood had their own accounting rules which always meant movies made a loss. What are they paying the tax on?
  - throwup238 3mo ago
    Hollywood accounting rules are regular accounting rules (GAAP). The only reason “Hollywood accounting” is a thing is because of a bunch of actors who didn’t know the difference between “gross” and “net” points got screwed over. Everyone involved still pays their taxes, but the special purpose vehicle used to organize the production is essentially a passthrough entity.
    - dcrazy 3mo ago
      If you’re not a name, you’re not getting gross points. There’s a wide swathe of participants (actors, writers, directors…) who need to demonstrate risk by taking net points to get signed, and they are routinely screwed by tactics like artificially inflated self-dealing distribution fees that cause the “production” itself to show a paper loss while the IP has generated hundreds of millions of dollars more than has been invested into it.
    - schlauerfox 3mo ago
      Movie Money Understanding Hollywood's (creative) Accounting Practices 9781879505865 This is THE book on the subject. There's a lot more to it than that. Sometimes productions get creatively charged by the studios costs that may not be directly related to shift losses. Sometimes contracts redefine common terms so your points structure is completely misleading.
    - 3mo ago
datakan 3mo ago
Nothing new. When I was in college down in LA I lived in a very small town founded by stunt people. Probably 80% of the people there were in the stunt business. Every few months they were off to another state or country for filming. Hollywood is just for the studio execs now, everyone else flies to whatever country offers the best tax breaks for them to film. They go to some pretty incredible lengths too, A friend of mine and his dad own a stunt company that works explicitly with semi-trucks. Pretty much every time you see a semi in a stunt in a movie it's either my friend or his dad driving it. They will ship these semi's to foreign countries instead of film locally because the tax incentives are greater than moving entire production companies around the world.
- wuliwong 3mo ago
  According to this article about 1/3rd as many movies are made in LA since the 90s. They were only making 30% of films in LA in the 90s so your experience still matches with the data but having 2/3rds of the local film production move elsewhere is significant.
  - expedition32 3mo ago
    Before the 1990s CGI did not exist yet. You really had to film stuff outside.
    - ghaff 3mo ago
      Seriously? Up to a certain point filming in studios and backlots was pretty much the norm.
      - mathgeek 3mo ago
        You're conflating three different eras. There was an era where backlot filming was the norm ("classic" movies before roughly the 70s), an era where on location was expected by audiences (pre-CGI), and the modern one we expect now. That's all rough and the reality is more intricate.
    - 3mo ago
DoneWithAllThat 3mo ago
I absolutely don’t want to imply there’s any one reason that he led us to where we are. This comment isn’t to try to undercut or malign some great data and investigation. But an article on this topic that literally does not include the word union in the entire text is not painting a full picture. You can fairly point out that unions still exist in Georgia, and that the UK and other European locations have robust worker protections - this isn’t a situation of union work vs. non-union work. But the extent to which unions in California have a stranglehold on the movie industry is absolutely part of the story here.
- jayd16 3mo ago
  Ok, what part then?
  - kaonwarb 3mo ago
    Raise wages, and hence costs, relative to non-union locations (a direct purpose of unions!); implement restrictive work rules; lead occasional strikes.
- graemep 3mo ago
  Given that New Zealand actually changed its laws to prevent unionisation in order to ensure The Hobbit was made there, I think unions are definitely a factor. I have no idea how strong the unions related to film are in the UK. It varies a lot between industries.
harrall 3mo ago
The cost of housing is probably the #1 reason and, in my opinion, California’s biggest problem. California as a whole is still doing pretty well but high housing cost is slowly pulling out the rug from under the state. But the California legislature does know that and has forced many cities to start building housing but there is still a lot work still in flight.
- WalterBright 3mo ago
  The flood of immigrants into California inevitably pushes up housing prices.
  - mikebenfield 3mo ago
    There are a lot more Americans than immigrants moving to California. And the number of people moving to California combined with Californians’ pathological resistance to building an adequate housing supply is what pushes up housing prices.
  - devindotcom 3mo ago
    Lol. Imagining someone sneaking across the border from Mexico so they can work under the table to afford a $4k/mo 1BR in Hollywood
    - laanon2026 3mo ago
      WalterBright got flagged into oblivion because of a war with reality. He said something to the effect of immigration causing/keeping real estate high/unaffordable. This IS what is happening. I live here in West LA. Immigration is causing this. It’s basic supply and demand. I live on one side of a 2 family in a 2 bdrm and rent out the living room space to make it more affordable. Next to me is a 6 unit building, all 2 bdrm units. Everyone is a recent immigrant from either Guatemala or Mexico. All six units house a family of at least 4 people. They work together to pay rent. No one is coming here from south of the boarder and paying 4K/month, themselves, to live in my neighborhood. They move in with immediate family or cousins or extended family. With 4-7 people working, the per person portion of rent is decreased substantially compared to COL expectations of indigenous Americans. This longterm trend pushes middle class people out, keeps real estate high and wages low. Even if you don’t live here all that is required to understand this phenomenon is basic econ and the courage to follow logical reasoning. I was born here. My family lived a very middle class life. The middle class was huge back then. The dynamics I explain have gutted the middle class and created a two tier class of the wealthy in the Hollywood Hills and a low income, immigrant, working class in mid city. This is growth economics and GDP must go up at the expense of everything else. I don’t blame the people running away from their own country’s problems to come here. It’s the path of least resistance. I like the majority of them as friends and neighbors. The system is massively exploitative and destructive and can only operate by replacing higher standard of living expectations with lower standard of living expectations. LA was a middle class American paradise from the 1950s-1980s. Lots of opportunities and sense of community for most people. LA has been transformed into a brutal globalist stratification. I work for Google and make relatively great money. Within a couple more years I’ll be able to buy a tiny million dollar ranch in San Clemente or opt to leave the state entirely. Most of the people I grew up with have not been as fortunate. There is another aspect of Southern California that virtually no one who didn’t grow up here is aware of. This is the endless expanse of building and development for the sake of building and development (growth economics) into the desert. East and southeast east of Ontario Airport is more or less (or was) extremely hostile rocky desert. Moreno Valley is one such artificial community. Zoom in with your maps app and take a look at the earth between development zones. This endless development into the desert makes the economy of Southern California go round. Southern California is not the model I want for the country. The density fetishists disturb me more than anyone else. There is no water here.
m463 3mo ago
Lots of things like this have happened. Silicon Valley stopped making computers, or any kind of manufacturing. Who knows, maybe some black projects exist. But I was told that some underground utilities in the area were non-standard, not just water, power, sewer, but also nitrogen or more.
dotBen 3mo ago
An interesting read but also feels like the rearranging of the deckchairs on the Titanic given the forthcoming disruption from generative AI in this industry. I spent some time last month with a relative in the industry (camera operator and producer) and he already uses some very sophisticated AI to map out scenes and shots in gen ai full video before they shoot IRL. It's mostly a cost saving exercise as well as occasionally helping to improve the quality of the deliverable. He is totally expecting that the next shift will be that gen ai video will become good enough to be considered the master (ie no need to film) and he is already transferring his skills as a camera operator into prompting and AI assisted scene design. He knows that many different disciplines he works with will all compete for that prompting work and there obviously won't be enough work for everybody to go around. The first part of this is using human actors in front of 360 video stages like The Volume [0] to display the sets (which was pioneered by The Mandalorian) and then ultimately the actors themselves will be AI rendered. And at this point it doesn't matter where this is filmed. I grew up close by to Pinewood Studios 30+years ago - I can't imagine them putting a lot more investment and development into that lot given where this is all going. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StageCraft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StageCraft
- coliveira 3mo ago
  What will probably happen is that they'll buy the rights to use faces of famous people (actors or not) and use AI (or cheap actors) to do the real scenes.
- keiferski 3mo ago
  This is only going to replace movies that were already using CGI. If every movie defaulted to CGI over natural settings, you wouldn't have stuff like the Odyssey made...which is setting sales records.
- sublinear 3mo ago
  I still don't understand why there's such a race to the bottom. If they don't want to make a movie properly, why make it at all? The corner cutting across the board has become so bad that these movies are unwatchable. This isn't even a new problem. A lot of traditional CGI can still be bad enough to ruin the illusion when it's the state of the art and a lot of attention to detail went into it. We've been circling the drain for decades. I suspect this is why everything became superheroes for a while. The illusion doesn't have to be good to meet that low of a bar. If the goal is to be as cheap as possible, you might as well release the story as a picture book written by AI.
fryanyway_swe 3mo ago
I mean, kind of good maybe? As someone not in the USA who loves movies, it is too easy to get sick of LA and desert locations everywhere.
- OJFord 3mo ago
  A lot of non-LA/desert scenes are LA sets.
api 3mo ago
When corporations grow to a certain size, they become banks. The same thing kind of happens to industries when they get dominated by a few large players. The large players are banks. The core of the industry becomes a form of finance. Hollywood is now the financial capital of the film industry, not where films are made. Hollywood finances films.
- DenisM 3mo ago
  Years ago I learned that GM’s financial arm made more money than the car company. The other day I also read that airlines make more money from selling points than from flying people. Crazy world.
Papazsazsa 3mo ago
My take on the problems including cost sickness: 1) Supply/demand. There's actually a shortage of quality movies relative to what the market will bear, one need only look at the occasional breakout hit like Obsession to see that it's possible to make a ton of money if you understand the demand signals. 2) Demand signals. Median age of someone with greenlight authority is ~62. In the 80s, there were 30-year-olds running entire studios. No disrespect to Boomers, but this business is about marketing cultural products and they have no idea about the culture. This also creates significant demographic headwinds in the job market. 3) Costs. Wages/COL are a part of it, as are unions, star power demand, and how companies like AAPL/AMZN can do streaming as a loss-leaders, which creates a lot of downward pressure. The biggest one is that in theatrical CAC > LTV. You can spend 2x your production budget on marketing and that investment evaporates the first week of showing – there's no real brand loyalty to studios/streamers, especially now that they've commoditized their IP and put it on rotation through the online platforms. 4) Originality. Franchises, sequels, and remakes were roughly three-quarters of 2025, and nine of top ten 2024 worldwide grossers were sequels. This is a result of local minima/risk arbitrage in the studio's portfolios, the bottom line is that people will still show up for a Spiderman movie even if its crappy b/c of the pre-aware IP and there's nothing better out there. There are wonderful exceptions to this of course, like Christopher Nolan and many indie films. 5) Politics. Hard to not deal with politics amidst the outrage cycle, but the easiest way to achieve that is to have a plurality of viewpoints – which you can get if you stop trying to bend beloved IP to contemporary politics and just make new shit!
- watwut 3mo ago
  Ad 2.) 30 years old are on the youtube. They do their own thing. And it is also actually ok to do entertainment for older people, including boomers. People act as if there was something shameful about over 40 existing and have entertainment for them. It is as ok as enrertainment for young.
  - MisterTea 3mo ago
    My 70-something mother loves youtube.
bhewes 3mo ago
Explains why I have slowly stopped watching live action. I can't stand the cognitive dissociation that needs to happen for me watch. Simple one light is different in NYC and Toronto.
shevy-java 3mo ago
To be fair: the quality of movies produced by Hollywood has gone rapidly downhill already in the 1990s. You only need to compare the movies Quentin Tarantino makes; now personally I think Pulp Fiction is still by far his best work, but I concede that the movies he created lateron were above average (though I would not go as far as many others, who'd rate these in the 8 to 10 point ranges; I'd go more between 6 to 7 or 7.5, largely because there are a few smaller issues cropping up and I always notice these when I compare them with Pulp Fiction, which was really good; actually really well-made). I noticed this in the 1990s in many movies. For instance, Independence Day - the computer animation pissed me off. I found them bad. Even Terminator 2, where evidently many people say it was great, I was nowhere near as convinced; I found the first terminator better and more "logical" and more consistent, too. But things decayed quickly in the 1990s really. Even movies such as Avatar I find total garbage. And while I am not totally against superhero comic/marvel adaptations (I liked xmen and in particular Hugh Jackman as wolverine), these are always the same formula. Tons of CGI, big fights where nobody knows what is going on, very little thought elsewhere in that formula. There are exceptions, but by and large these things keep on happening. Individual directors manage to break out of the mold (Chris Nolan) but by and large movies really SUCK now compared to the "oldschool days". And while some of this may be due to me becoming more critical, the production quality just sunk. Take movies such as Megalopolis - this captures what is going wrong. It seems as if the whole movie industry has partially collapsed in the last +25 years and they don't really know what to do to change this. The same has happened to games, by the way. It is almost as if only one formula exists only now.
- fluoridation 3mo ago
  Investment-driven development. When it's no longer about creating something compelling, but about convincing the investors that banking the production means a fairly safe ROI, you stop getting creative works by auteurs and you start getting sequels, remakes, and low-stake, inoffensive, mediocre, forgettable, bland sludge. At the upper end, investors give directors checklists and guidelines to limit their authorial voice. That's why it doesn't matter who the directors of the MCU movies have been. They're just Disney-produced movies. A film student could have directed them and it wouldn't make a difference.
mmaunder 3mo ago
Because of financial incentives. And it makes critics sad when films aren’t shot where their story is based. Saved you reading it.
YesBox 3mo ago
Video game industry analysts are predicting the same is going to happen to their (my) industry. Contract out more and more work to SEA/China/Poland et.al. It's extra painful because games are relatively cheap to localize (fantasy is universal, it's just translating text and words), so studios based in cheaper parts of the world already have an advantage and they have access to the west markets. Global competition can be brutal.
- YesBox 3mo ago
  As an aside, there are large portions of the US where coastal folks dont want to live. These places are 2-4x cheaper (compared to costal game industry hubs) and could be cost competitive.. but it's probably not going to happen.
  - frollogaston 3mo ago
    Probably still more expensive and with less concentrated talent than the other places outside the US.
fsuts 3mo ago
I saw a Trump clip not long after his inauguration where he said he was unhappy about Hollywood moving overseas due to tax cuts but so far nothing. Like with manufacturing in China, allowing your competitor countries to build up expertise means at some point it become difficult to regain top place. And whilst bulk of the profits may flow back to the USA at present, may not always be the case. It’s not like it’s been hidden, all USA needs to do is reduce the gap so financially there is no incentive to go abroad. Great for other countries though.
toast0 3mo ago
> The quintessential example of this is Broadway, where the cost of living in New York City increases, leading wages to rise, but there remains a fixed set of theaters for Broadway shows to be staged, thereby limiting revenue growth. The end result is economic unsustainability, as these productions either curtail spending by employing fewer people or pass higher costs along to consumers through ticket pricing, often both. Adding more Broadway (or off-Broadway) theaters to increase revenue wouldn't really address costs; the additional productions would presumably have similar staffing costs as the existing productions, so ticket prices would need to be similar in order to recoup the costs. [1] But viewers would have more options and be less likely to pay the top ticket prices. [1] Unless you're certain that the show would fail...
- colinhb 3mo ago
  [dead]
jmugan 3mo ago
It really breaks the illusion for me when a movie is shot where it isn't set. I'm like, "What? They don't have pine trees in Austin."
- EdwardDiego 3mo ago
  I was watching a terrible movie, Wolverine, and the titular character is driving through Canada, we're told, and I found myself thinking that "huh, that bit of Canada looks a lot like New Zealand, interesting." Then he drives across a one-way bridge, and tracking shot above the car captures the big arrow New Zealand paints on the exit lane indicating you should drive in the *left* lane (started doing this after few too many tired tourists from RHD countries reverted to habit upon leaving a one-way bridge causing a head-on collision further down the road). They could've edited the arrow out, surely. TL;DR thought Canada in a movie looked like New Zealand, it was New Zealand.
g42gregory 3mo ago
With a very few exceptions, I don’t watch anything made past 2016. Not sure what happened in Hollywood then, but it’s just seems that they are constantly making some sort of public service messages that they need to pay me to watch. Not the other way around. That goes even if I agree with some of the messages.
- biophysboy 3mo ago
  There’s definitely didactic art made post 2016, but I wouldn’t write everything off beyond that date forever. Online review aggregators are less reliable for recent movies, so you might want to find individuals that you trust for >2016 recs, instead of algorithmic scores.
- bradchris 3mo ago
  I actually view 2012-2020 as peak “PSA messaging” era more, which a lot of people would probably coincide with the liberal optimism from Obama and course-correcting anxiety of Trump term 1. I think since covid Hollywood has “toned it down”, because the US has by and large moved on from that social phenomenon. I’ve been in Los Angeles for over a decade, and I disagree with the premise that Hollywood has some overarching plan to shape how we think— more people watch TikToks than movies and network TV. I view Hollywood, and the creators/writers/producers of films themselves, moreso holding up a mirror reflecting the current circumstances we’re in rather than manufacturing it out of nowhere.
- quickthrowman 3mo ago
  It was Netflix. Only the most milquetoast pablum gets made over there and it’s all shot with the same cameras and settings and it all looks the same and every idea is ripped from either an HBO show if it’s a series, or an older film if it’s a film. They sprayed Marvel content everywhere to my dismay, I can’t think of a less interesting universe or setting than “gritty version of reality except with superheroes”. Netflix hasn’t made a single TV show or film worth watching. It really killed filmmaking, I’ve only seen ~5 movies released since 2016: Parasite, Backrooms, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Get Out, Don’t Look Up. I watch plenty of movies, there are more great movies from the 1940s to 2010s than I’ll ever have time to watch. I hope interesting movies start being made again. Hollywood also went into sequel overdrive and released very few original properties and milked X-men, Harry Potter, Star Wars, etc. That didn’t help.
benzadeus 3mo ago
What about the woke movement and movies turning into politics?
rfwhyte 3mo ago
Something interesting to note, is that while "Hollywood" is fast losing its status as the nexus of the traditional film / tv industries, LA in the broader sense is already very well established as the global (Well at least "Western") hub of the content creator economy. Literally thousands of wannabe / up and coming YouTubers, Tik Tokers and "Influencers" of all sorts are packing up their lives and moving to LA every year in order to be closer to each other, and to the talent pool of cast-off film and tv folks that live in LA. The "Cost disease" seemingly hasn't yet infected that industry at least (Or the infection is still in its early incubating stage) though I think that's in large part due to the fact most of the content creators aren't working within the established industry framework, but rather are intentionally trying to work outside of it, in order to avoid paying union rates.
- asdff 3mo ago
  $10k rent on a hollywood hills mansion isn't so bad when you have it sleeping 10-15 20 year olds.
beloch 3mo ago
Blockbusters and tax credits started the trend, but green-screen filming sure accelerated it. Now that so many movies are almost entirely CG, it really doesn't matter where the green screen studio physically exists. The silver lining (for Americans) is that Hollywood movies are still very Hollywood. Canadian actors, Canadian crews, and Canadian filming facilities all combine to make utterly American films. If real locations are used, they're carefully chosen so that Vancouver stands in for New York, Calgary for Minnesota, etc.. Canadian references, accents, and values are all carefully erased. The one thing that seems to stay stubbornly American is the money people.
egberts1 3mo ago
Nowadays, we see movies being made deep on the heart of Texas!
deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
madrox 3mo ago
Tangential to this, I worked in Hollywood for a while. The studio I worked at had a gaggle of unpaid interns. There was a mix of normal kids and the sons/daughters of prominent Hollywood execs. I would agree, in many respects, that unpaid internships are glorified daycare. It isn't like a tech internship. No one gets a project to own. The reason these roles existed at all was because it didn't cost anything. Paying them would've required justifying the cost, and there was no way to justify these kids. I'd say interns were productive maybe 15% of the time. They just hung out and if you needed something done you didn't want to do, you could pull one to do it. Usually physical tasks (track down a wig) or internet research. Yes, they'd occassionally do coffee/lunch runs. In my experience, I found the nepo babies to be the least entitled workers. They never balked at what you asked them to do, and understood the assignment quickly. They had a great attitude. They often went beyond what you asked. By contrast, other interns usually had some kind of attitude about it or required way more hand holding. I was pretty surprised; common wisdom would lead you to expect the opposite. I looked them up recently, and many of them are doing small film stuff shooting in LA.
- actionfromafar 3mo ago
  Maybe those nepos actually were interested in the craft and came there by active choice?
  - madrox 3mo ago
    Arguably everyone was. Certainly no one was doing it for the money. I suspect there is a myth among most people that executives -- especially Hollywood ones -- didn't get to that position by being smarter or harder working than others, or in doing so did not pass those qualities onto their children. Perhaps there is truth there, but I have yet to see it with my own eyes.
    - adithyassekhar 3mo ago
      I don’t think I have seen anyone wanting to be an actor because it’ll make them rich. It’s comes with the job and they are aware of it but that won’t be the motivation.
bawolff 3mo ago
> Perhaps I have gone to great lengths to prove something studio executives already know: the average viewer is not scrutinizing every frame for telltale glimpses of the Toronto skyline. Or you know, even knows what the toronto skyline looks like. I used to live in vancouver, tons of films are shot there. Unless they are pointing the camera at a famous landmark, i probably can't tell. If anything the forest is more of a give away then the city (if it looks like an alien planet in star trek ToS, then its LA. If it looks like an alien planet in stargate then its vancouver)
rossdavidh 3mo ago
"The end result is a peculiar version of Hollywood: a place increasingly devoid of physical production, populated instead by executives, AI art, and unpaid interns drag-racing golf carts through empty studio streets..." With the correct writer, that could be a cool indie movie, right there.
- shermantanktop 3mo ago
  So many movies about Hollywood...usually populated with a self-insert writer or director.
JimsonYang 3mo ago
I was talking to a guy who did hollywood financing- when you get a 40% tax credit from the national level plus a 3 mil tax break at the state level producers will gladly shift production especially when the financial realities of film are pretty tough
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llm_nerd 3mo ago
A good question to ask is why did Hollywood, as a centralized thing, ever exist in the first place? Cameras and equipment was expensive and not terribly mobile. Having a few studios and lots with the cameras and lights and rigs and so on gave you a huge advantage. From that a lot of the industry moved to an area, so it also had the network effect. People start getting lazy and want to commute to their latest project, so the whole #FilmInLA is compelling. That's disappearing. Rapidly. The idea that one place is where movies are made is comically obsolete. Talent is around the globe. Handheld cameras provide extraordinary quality and can work off the lighting of a candle. And honestly, Los Angeles is a stunningly boring city. And if the movie is invariably some navel gazing about it by its residents (always, always featuring long shots of people on highways or driving around, because every LA film has to jerkoff about driving), why should a film be filmed there? I'd infinitely prefer London, Paris, Toronto, Miami, Vancouver, Berlin, NYC, Chicago, rural areas, Rome, and so on. The world would be a better place if this sort of backwards, historic centralization was obliterated.
diogenescynic 3mo ago
Just like how Detroit stopped making cars and Silicon Valley no longer manufactures semiconductors. Seems like capitalism always finds a way to outsource those jobs in a race to the bottom for the lowest wages/taxes/regulation.
jmyeet 3mo ago
Corporations want a reproducible formula that can scale. Creating movies (and TV) is an inherently creative process. The people who end up running these businesses hate that but creativity doesn't scale. This is why reputation and track record is so important in getting any project greenlit. So the likes of Steven Spielberg, James Cameron or Christopher Nolan have a lot of freedom. They can't quite make what they want. A studio still has to bankroll the project and they may not like it. This is how Francis Ford Coppola ended up self-funding Megalopolis and, well, the studios were right to pass, let's be reeal. This is also why we get so many sequeals, remarks and reboots. It's a property with a proven track record. That's so much easier to get greenlit. The other thing that happens is that corporations (including studios) can only increase profits by cutting costs and raising prices. And this last one has basically killed the ecosystem upon which movies (and TV) depend. Let me explain. Once upon a time, LA was relativvely cheap to live in. This allowed people to live there and work on getting their break while working flexible, often service jobs. Waittressing, hosting, that sort of thing. It could be anything, really. But it has to be flexible enough to take time off to go to auditions and jobs and whatnot. It is very difficult to make a full-time career out of working in this industry. If you're an actor and you, say, get a principal guest role on a TV series you might make $1000-2000/day but you only end up working 1-2 days on that every 3 months. You can't live on that. Recently there was a piece on the actor who played Sam in Lord of the Rings having to sell his house even though he made $250k for the 3 movies. That was over several years. This isn't just for acting. Lighting, camera work, production, direction, editing, writing, special effects, costumes, etc etc etc. What sustained people were residuals and the relatively low cost of living. Residuals for TV basically got killed by streaming. A lot of movie projects became unsustainable when the VHS/DVD/Blu-ray revenue pipeline dried up. Matt Damon spoke about this. But the other thing streaming killed was the network TV pipeline. A bunch of screenplays would be written (and sold). I'm talking hundreds. A handful of those would be made into pilots. These days that's maybe 10-15 per year. Previously it was 50-100+. A certain number of those went to a half then full series order of 22+ episodes. Getting one job could sustain you for the year. Streaming came along. The residuals went away. Those 22 episode seasons became 8-12 episode seasons every 2-3 years if you're lucky. There was no syndication money anymore. Working people in the industry relied upon residuals in dry spells to make a living. And suddenly you needed 2-3 jobs a year instead of 1 and that's really difficult to get and, even if you get it, to schedule so they don't conflict. And then obviously ticket sales in movie theaters were in decline and fell off a cliff with the pandemic. Starting in the 2000s you had the shift to save costs to places like Atlanta, Vancouver and Toronto. Productions started chasing tax credits all over the world and would immediatley leave when they ended. Let me elaborate on just one example: writing. To get into this field you generally would start as a production assistant ("PA"). This would generally be an unpaid position initially (an "internship"). At some point if you didn't screw up, you might start getting paid. Then you'd be the assistant to a writer. This would give you experience in a writers room. Hopefully whoever you worked for would give you feedback and teach you things. The next step would be to get a staff writer job. Back in the day you'd get paid for 22 episodes. You'd be on set for filming and you'd learn production. Most producers came from a writing background. Eventually, this career would lead you to being a showrunner. Think Shonda Rhimes or Vince Gilligan or Matthew Weiner. Weiner in particular learned his craft and earned street cred as a staff writer on The Sopranos and he tried to sell Mad Men to HBO. Now what happens if you get hired to write 8 episodes instead of 22 so you'd getting one-third of the pay. Your job is over before shooting starts so none of these young writers are getting experience to become producers and ultimately showrunners. It's a bit like how some companies stop hiring juniors and just overwork seniors with the threat of layoffs. Well, those seniors used to be juniors. Don't hire and train juniors and eventually there won't be any seniors. Same thing. I guess the short version is: streaming killed Hollywood.
rbanffy 3mo ago
All change is mourned. This is nothing but market logic pursuing low costs, extracting work from gradients of wealth. In Hollywood the gradient is low compared to other “exotic” locations such as Toronto, Prague or Florida. This exodus will remain until production costs in LA fall below the costs in other places, or LA can offer a measurable benefit compared to other locations. Capitalism is a double edged sword - it allocates labor very efficiently, but when you are providing the labor, you don’t want to have that labor extracted from you too efficiently.
fxtentacle 3mo ago
“many of Hollywood’s problems can be traced back to a single economic theory of everything: the rent is too damn high.”

225 points by speckx 3mo ago

>For studio executives, it means making do with smaller crews, outsourcing production overseas, and, eventually, using AI to replace some human labor. Ah so this might be how "shorter working hours" looks on the ground. "Leisure and Culture"'s share of the pie has actually shrunk abit: https://archive.md/2026.06.04-075622/https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jun/04/world-inequality-lab-equality-academics-planetary-survival#:~:text=Share%20of%20global%20economic%20labour%20hours%20by%20sector%2C%20%25 https://archive.md/2026.06.04-075622/https://www.theguardian... That's world, not US, so it might also be that foreign production teams are not counted as "leisure and culture" in their own jurisdictions lol Original pdf here, p11 https://globaljusticeproject.wid.world/www-site/uploads/2026/06/GlobalJusticeReport_WebsiteVersion.pdf https://globaljusticeproject.wid.world/www-site/uploads/2026...

aprilthird2021 3mo ago

I wonder if this will change as Hollywood is eyeing three $1B+ box office earners back to back to back this summer

epolanski 3mo ago
Unlikely. Money is money, and if you can film in UK where you get tax incentives and lower costs there's no reason to film in Hollywood.
- aprilthird2021 3mo ago
  Could say the same about filming on IMAX, refusing to use CGI, various cost cutting measures taken by cheaper looking Netflix movies. Idk, the need to worry about cost fluctuates with how much you make. That's also true
laidoffamazon 3mo ago
But weren't they all made outside of Hollywood? Emeryville, around Europe and the UK, and then the UK for Toy Story 5, Odyssey, and Spiderman respectively?
- asdff 3mo ago
  A decent amount of odyssey was actually filmed on the universal backlot
  - gedy 3mo ago
    Which is cool, but also likely an outlier due to Christopher Nolan's usage of practical effects vs CGI. His clout probably helped with the funding of that tbh.
    - asdff 3mo ago
      They are still building new soundstages as we speak.
- aprilthird2021 3mo ago
  Sure but I meant now they are making more than before they might not be as cost sensitive going forward

vrosas 3mo ago

> For a major blockbuster, tax incentives equate to tens of millions of dollars, freeing up money for name-brand actors, elaborate set pieces, and unremarkable CGI effects. Love the dig at the end.

heresie-dabord 3mo ago
To paraphrase Syndrome [0]: When everything is a explosion, then nothing will be an explosion. [0] _ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_The_Incredibles_characters#Syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_The_Incredibles_charac...
deleted 3mo ago
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bsenftner 3mo ago

I worked in Los Angeles doing animation and VFX software for 33 years, and left 5 years ago as the cost of living there made no sense, and my prospects for work became nomadic global chasing of work now taking place in countries with no or ignored labor laws. (As if labor laws are respected in the US anyway.) Interesting in relation to the article, the author describes working out of the empty Warner Bros. lot; I lived across the street, right next to "The Starlite" (the author will recognize.) Los Angeles and the entertainment industry's economics are brutal. My wife is exponentially more successful than I, a film she was the VFX producer for won an Oscar, she's an industry player, and still LA is too expensive.

intheitmines 3mo ago
Super interesting, do you feel this is death by 1000 cuts or can you point at the economics no longer working as small handful of causes (i.e. rise of cost of living in LA, move towards direct to streaming rather than theater releases, AI workflows)?
- bsenftner 3mo ago
  I think the economics of a global entertainment and wealthy persons' playground is what is "ruining" Los Angeles. Earlier in my time there, I spent time in an uber-wealthy circle and basically encountered Epstein-class people doing what they do with the children of their own staff, and that is when I noped out of that entire social circle. There is not much that can be done when you see such wealth pursuing such agendas and you also see them with celebrities, as well as senior city and state officials. Such people are untouchable as far as the law is concerned. Los Angeles is sick with treating others as disposable, with sexual aspects included. And it is not "Los Angeles", this is human nature without boundaries.
  - preommr 3mo ago
    > encountered Epstein-class people doing what they do with the children of their own staff kind of glossing over something pretty major
3mo ago

smallstepforman 3mo ago

In the next decade, AI will be gutting every industry associated with hollywood other than nvidia and tmsc.

ramesh31 3mo ago

>"If this has all drifted into bummertown, it’s because many of Hollywood’s problems can be traced back to a single economic theory of everything: the rent is too damn high. From there, everything else starts to unravel." It's really understated just how much this is behind absolutely everything today. The only reason it became normal for SV software companies to pay 100k+ salaries to interns in the 2010s is because half of that had to be handed over to a landlord every month just to have people physically able to show up to your office. This is why Europe and Asia have completely dominated production of all the great AAA games over the last decade; when creative people can afford to live somewhere, all of the sudden you have the resources to truly focus on a product.

akurilin 3mo ago
Cue https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-everything/ https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-every...
coliveira 3mo ago
Also, a lot of real estate is owned by the Hollywood investors or their close friends, so this is a circular economy where they get rich, then buy property in that place and get even richer with real estate increasing in value. The same thing happened in Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and many other places.
pessimizer 3mo ago
That rent is simply a tax (tribute) paid from people (peasants) to property owners (lords.) It's why people who own capital are the wealthiest that they've ever been in history despite producing nothing and increasingly being of severely subnormal intelligence. The distraction is that a lot of people think that they are property owners who are not. The bank owns your property, you're a tax farmer. The people who own the bank are your bosses. They are granted the right by the state to loan you the money to buy an overvalued property, without actually having the money to loan you, and on the condition that the property that you bought is theirs if you miss a repayment on the money that they loaned you that that they didn't have. This is also why building more housing does not work in the long term to lower rents. We have a surplus of housing, just like we have a surplus of commercial property. But we have arbitrarily changed expectations for the margins of finance capital. The tax farmers (most landlords) are a distraction so that their tiny margins can be pointed at - because the money was made from the property when they purchased it. Now they're behind the 8-ball trying to make the payments, until they lose their job to a better tax farmer. If you build 9000 shitty units at the site of a grocery store, you can raise all of the rents around them because the 9000 shitty units are now an escape valve against displacement and dislocation. The next step is to raise the rents on the 9000 shitty units, by any means necessary, even if it means keeping half of them empty for a decade, and using them to write off your taxes on other properties you own. The fact that there's no grocery store and no parking for 9000 units? Your problem. YIMBY activism is entirely financed by these people, which is why it's so loud.

digitalsurgeonz 3mo ago

Hollywood makes slop now, the last movie I saw was some iteration of Mission Impossible where the genius agent defeats the all powerful AI and that just felt like lack of imagination.

esafak 3mo ago
You picked such a commercial movie to make your case. Why not Bugonia, The Odyssey, One Battle After Another, Project Hail Mary, Frankenstein, etc. (all recent)
- digitalsurgeonz 3mo ago
  omg project hail marry, what a dumb story, they reduced an intelligent life form to a human pet dog.

AlexB138 3mo ago

The article repeatedly mentions how production moved to Atlanta due to tax incentives. Even that is a race to the bottom, as Disney moved production of Marvel movies out of Atlanta last year to the UK where they got better tax incentives. Even the undercutting cities are being undercut.

noja 3mo ago
Why though? I thought Hollywood had their own accounting rules which always meant movies made a loss. What are they paying the tax on?
- throwup238 3mo ago
  Hollywood accounting rules are regular accounting rules (GAAP). The only reason “Hollywood accounting” is a thing is because of a bunch of actors who didn’t know the difference between “gross” and “net” points got screwed over. Everyone involved still pays their taxes, but the special purpose vehicle used to organize the production is essentially a passthrough entity.
  - dcrazy 3mo ago
    If you’re not a name, you’re not getting gross points. There’s a wide swathe of participants (actors, writers, directors…) who need to demonstrate risk by taking net points to get signed, and they are routinely screwed by tactics like artificially inflated self-dealing distribution fees that cause the “production” itself to show a paper loss while the IP has generated hundreds of millions of dollars more than has been invested into it.
  - schlauerfox 3mo ago
    Movie Money Understanding Hollywood's (creative) Accounting Practices 9781879505865 This is THE book on the subject. There's a lot more to it than that. Sometimes productions get creatively charged by the studios costs that may not be directly related to shift losses. Sometimes contracts redefine common terms so your points structure is completely misleading.
  - 3mo ago

datakan 3mo ago

Nothing new. When I was in college down in LA I lived in a very small town founded by stunt people. Probably 80% of the people there were in the stunt business. Every few months they were off to another state or country for filming. Hollywood is just for the studio execs now, everyone else flies to whatever country offers the best tax breaks for them to film. They go to some pretty incredible lengths too, A friend of mine and his dad own a stunt company that works explicitly with semi-trucks. Pretty much every time you see a semi in a stunt in a movie it's either my friend or his dad driving it. They will ship these semi's to foreign countries instead of film locally because the tax incentives are greater than moving entire production companies around the world.

wuliwong 3mo ago
According to this article about 1/3rd as many movies are made in LA since the 90s. They were only making 30% of films in LA in the 90s so your experience still matches with the data but having 2/3rds of the local film production move elsewhere is significant.
- expedition32 3mo ago
  Before the 1990s CGI did not exist yet. You really had to film stuff outside.
  - ghaff 3mo ago
    Seriously? Up to a certain point filming in studios and backlots was pretty much the norm.
    - mathgeek 3mo ago
      You're conflating three different eras. There was an era where backlot filming was the norm ("classic" movies before roughly the 70s), an era where on location was expected by audiences (pre-CGI), and the modern one we expect now. That's all rough and the reality is more intricate.
  - 3mo ago

DoneWithAllThat 3mo ago

I absolutely don’t want to imply there’s any one reason that he led us to where we are. This comment isn’t to try to undercut or malign some great data and investigation. But an article on this topic that literally does not include the word union in the entire text is not painting a full picture. You can fairly point out that unions still exist in Georgia, and that the UK and other European locations have robust worker protections - this isn’t a situation of union work vs. non-union work. But the extent to which unions in California have a stranglehold on the movie industry is absolutely part of the story here.

jayd16 3mo ago
Ok, what part then?
- kaonwarb 3mo ago
  Raise wages, and hence costs, relative to non-union locations (a direct purpose of unions!); implement restrictive work rules; lead occasional strikes.
graemep 3mo ago
Given that New Zealand actually changed its laws to prevent unionisation in order to ensure The Hobbit was made there, I think unions are definitely a factor. I have no idea how strong the unions related to film are in the UK. It varies a lot between industries.

harrall 3mo ago

The cost of housing is probably the #1 reason and, in my opinion, California’s biggest problem. California as a whole is still doing pretty well but high housing cost is slowly pulling out the rug from under the state. But the California legislature does know that and has forced many cities to start building housing but there is still a lot work still in flight.

WalterBright 3mo ago
The flood of immigrants into California inevitably pushes up housing prices.
- mikebenfield 3mo ago
  There are a lot more Americans than immigrants moving to California. And the number of people moving to California combined with Californians’ pathological resistance to building an adequate housing supply is what pushes up housing prices.
- devindotcom 3mo ago
  Lol. Imagining someone sneaking across the border from Mexico so they can work under the table to afford a $4k/mo 1BR in Hollywood
  - laanon2026 3mo ago
    WalterBright got flagged into oblivion because of a war with reality. He said something to the effect of immigration causing/keeping real estate high/unaffordable. This IS what is happening. I live here in West LA. Immigration is causing this. It’s basic supply and demand. I live on one side of a 2 family in a 2 bdrm and rent out the living room space to make it more affordable. Next to me is a 6 unit building, all 2 bdrm units. Everyone is a recent immigrant from either Guatemala or Mexico. All six units house a family of at least 4 people. They work together to pay rent. No one is coming here from south of the boarder and paying 4K/month, themselves, to live in my neighborhood. They move in with immediate family or cousins or extended family. With 4-7 people working, the per person portion of rent is decreased substantially compared to COL expectations of indigenous Americans. This longterm trend pushes middle class people out, keeps real estate high and wages low. Even if you don’t live here all that is required to understand this phenomenon is basic econ and the courage to follow logical reasoning. I was born here. My family lived a very middle class life. The middle class was huge back then. The dynamics I explain have gutted the middle class and created a two tier class of the wealthy in the Hollywood Hills and a low income, immigrant, working class in mid city. This is growth economics and GDP must go up at the expense of everything else. I don’t blame the people running away from their own country’s problems to come here. It’s the path of least resistance. I like the majority of them as friends and neighbors. The system is massively exploitative and destructive and can only operate by replacing higher standard of living expectations with lower standard of living expectations. LA was a middle class American paradise from the 1950s-1980s. Lots of opportunities and sense of community for most people. LA has been transformed into a brutal globalist stratification. I work for Google and make relatively great money. Within a couple more years I’ll be able to buy a tiny million dollar ranch in San Clemente or opt to leave the state entirely. Most of the people I grew up with have not been as fortunate. There is another aspect of Southern California that virtually no one who didn’t grow up here is aware of. This is the endless expanse of building and development for the sake of building and development (growth economics) into the desert. East and southeast east of Ontario Airport is more or less (or was) extremely hostile rocky desert. Moreno Valley is one such artificial community. Zoom in with your maps app and take a look at the earth between development zones. This endless development into the desert makes the economy of Southern California go round. Southern California is not the model I want for the country. The density fetishists disturb me more than anyone else. There is no water here.

m463 3mo ago

Lots of things like this have happened. Silicon Valley stopped making computers, or any kind of manufacturing. Who knows, maybe some black projects exist. But I was told that some underground utilities in the area were non-standard, not just water, power, sewer, but also nitrogen or more.

dotBen 3mo ago

An interesting read but also feels like the rearranging of the deckchairs on the Titanic given the forthcoming disruption from generative AI in this industry. I spent some time last month with a relative in the industry (camera operator and producer) and he already uses some very sophisticated AI to map out scenes and shots in gen ai full video before they shoot IRL. It's mostly a cost saving exercise as well as occasionally helping to improve the quality of the deliverable. He is totally expecting that the next shift will be that gen ai video will become good enough to be considered the master (ie no need to film) and he is already transferring his skills as a camera operator into prompting and AI assisted scene design. He knows that many different disciplines he works with will all compete for that prompting work and there obviously won't be enough work for everybody to go around. The first part of this is using human actors in front of 360 video stages like The Volume [0] to display the sets (which was pioneered by The Mandalorian) and then ultimately the actors themselves will be AI rendered. And at this point it doesn't matter where this is filmed. I grew up close by to Pinewood Studios 30+years ago - I can't imagine them putting a lot more investment and development into that lot given where this is all going. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StageCraft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StageCraft

coliveira 3mo ago
What will probably happen is that they'll buy the rights to use faces of famous people (actors or not) and use AI (or cheap actors) to do the real scenes.
keiferski 3mo ago
This is only going to replace movies that were already using CGI. If every movie defaulted to CGI over natural settings, you wouldn't have stuff like the Odyssey made...which is setting sales records.
sublinear 3mo ago
I still don't understand why there's such a race to the bottom. If they don't want to make a movie properly, why make it at all? The corner cutting across the board has become so bad that these movies are unwatchable. This isn't even a new problem. A lot of traditional CGI can still be bad enough to ruin the illusion when it's the state of the art and a lot of attention to detail went into it. We've been circling the drain for decades. I suspect this is why everything became superheroes for a while. The illusion doesn't have to be good to meet that low of a bar. If the goal is to be as cheap as possible, you might as well release the story as a picture book written by AI.

fryanyway_swe 3mo ago

I mean, kind of good maybe? As someone not in the USA who loves movies, it is too easy to get sick of LA and desert locations everywhere.

OJFord 3mo ago
A lot of non-LA/desert scenes are LA sets.

api 3mo ago

When corporations grow to a certain size, they become banks. The same thing kind of happens to industries when they get dominated by a few large players. The large players are banks. The core of the industry becomes a form of finance. Hollywood is now the financial capital of the film industry, not where films are made. Hollywood finances films.

DenisM 3mo ago
Years ago I learned that GM’s financial arm made more money than the car company. The other day I also read that airlines make more money from selling points than from flying people. Crazy world.

Papazsazsa 3mo ago

My take on the problems including cost sickness: 1) Supply/demand. There's actually a shortage of quality movies relative to what the market will bear, one need only look at the occasional breakout hit like Obsession to see that it's possible to make a ton of money if you understand the demand signals. 2) Demand signals. Median age of someone with greenlight authority is ~62. In the 80s, there were 30-year-olds running entire studios. No disrespect to Boomers, but this business is about marketing cultural products and they have no idea about the culture. This also creates significant demographic headwinds in the job market. 3) Costs. Wages/COL are a part of it, as are unions, star power demand, and how companies like AAPL/AMZN can do streaming as a loss-leaders, which creates a lot of downward pressure. The biggest one is that in theatrical CAC > LTV. You can spend 2x your production budget on marketing and that investment evaporates the first week of showing – there's no real brand loyalty to studios/streamers, especially now that they've commoditized their IP and put it on rotation through the online platforms. 4) Originality. Franchises, sequels, and remakes were roughly three-quarters of 2025, and nine of top ten 2024 worldwide grossers were sequels. This is a result of local minima/risk arbitrage in the studio's portfolios, the bottom line is that people will still show up for a Spiderman movie even if its crappy b/c of the pre-aware IP and there's nothing better out there. There are wonderful exceptions to this of course, like Christopher Nolan and many indie films. 5) Politics. Hard to not deal with politics amidst the outrage cycle, but the easiest way to achieve that is to have a plurality of viewpoints – which you can get if you stop trying to bend beloved IP to contemporary politics and just make new shit!

watwut 3mo ago
Ad 2.) 30 years old are on the youtube. They do their own thing. And it is also actually ok to do entertainment for older people, including boomers. People act as if there was something shameful about over 40 existing and have entertainment for them. It is as ok as enrertainment for young.
- MisterTea 3mo ago
  My 70-something mother loves youtube.

bhewes 3mo ago

Explains why I have slowly stopped watching live action. I can't stand the cognitive dissociation that needs to happen for me watch. Simple one light is different in NYC and Toronto.

shevy-java 3mo ago

To be fair: the quality of movies produced by Hollywood has gone rapidly downhill already in the 1990s. You only need to compare the movies Quentin Tarantino makes; now personally I think Pulp Fiction is still by far his best work, but I concede that the movies he created lateron were above average (though I would not go as far as many others, who'd rate these in the 8 to 10 point ranges; I'd go more between 6 to 7 or 7.5, largely because there are a few smaller issues cropping up and I always notice these when I compare them with Pulp Fiction, which was really good; actually really well-made). I noticed this in the 1990s in many movies. For instance, Independence Day - the computer animation pissed me off. I found them bad. Even Terminator 2, where evidently many people say it was great, I was nowhere near as convinced; I found the first terminator better and more "logical" and more consistent, too. But things decayed quickly in the 1990s really. Even movies such as Avatar I find total garbage. And while I am not totally against superhero comic/marvel adaptations (I liked xmen and in particular Hugh Jackman as wolverine), these are always the same formula. Tons of CGI, big fights where nobody knows what is going on, very little thought elsewhere in that formula. There are exceptions, but by and large these things keep on happening. Individual directors manage to break out of the mold (Chris Nolan) but by and large movies really SUCK now compared to the "oldschool days". And while some of this may be due to me becoming more critical, the production quality just sunk. Take movies such as Megalopolis - this captures what is going wrong. It seems as if the whole movie industry has partially collapsed in the last +25 years and they don't really know what to do to change this. The same has happened to games, by the way. It is almost as if only one formula exists only now.

fluoridation 3mo ago
Investment-driven development. When it's no longer about creating something compelling, but about convincing the investors that banking the production means a fairly safe ROI, you stop getting creative works by auteurs and you start getting sequels, remakes, and low-stake, inoffensive, mediocre, forgettable, bland sludge. At the upper end, investors give directors checklists and guidelines to limit their authorial voice. That's why it doesn't matter who the directors of the MCU movies have been. They're just Disney-produced movies. A film student could have directed them and it wouldn't make a difference.

mmaunder 3mo ago

Because of financial incentives. And it makes critics sad when films aren’t shot where their story is based. Saved you reading it.

YesBox 3mo ago

Video game industry analysts are predicting the same is going to happen to their (my) industry. Contract out more and more work to SEA/China/Poland et.al. It's extra painful because games are relatively cheap to localize (fantasy is universal, it's just translating text and words), so studios based in cheaper parts of the world already have an advantage and they have access to the west markets. Global competition can be brutal.

YesBox 3mo ago
As an aside, there are large portions of the US where coastal folks dont want to live. These places are 2-4x cheaper (compared to costal game industry hubs) and could be cost competitive.. but it's probably not going to happen.
- frollogaston 3mo ago
  Probably still more expensive and with less concentrated talent than the other places outside the US.

fsuts 3mo ago

I saw a Trump clip not long after his inauguration where he said he was unhappy about Hollywood moving overseas due to tax cuts but so far nothing. Like with manufacturing in China, allowing your competitor countries to build up expertise means at some point it become difficult to regain top place. And whilst bulk of the profits may flow back to the USA at present, may not always be the case. It’s not like it’s been hidden, all USA needs to do is reduce the gap so financially there is no incentive to go abroad. Great for other countries though.

toast0 3mo ago

> The quintessential example of this is Broadway, where the cost of living in New York City increases, leading wages to rise, but there remains a fixed set of theaters for Broadway shows to be staged, thereby limiting revenue growth. The end result is economic unsustainability, as these productions either curtail spending by employing fewer people or pass higher costs along to consumers through ticket pricing, often both. Adding more Broadway (or off-Broadway) theaters to increase revenue wouldn't really address costs; the additional productions would presumably have similar staffing costs as the existing productions, so ticket prices would need to be similar in order to recoup the costs. [1] But viewers would have more options and be less likely to pay the top ticket prices. [1] Unless you're certain that the show would fail...

colinhb 3mo ago
[dead]

jmugan 3mo ago

It really breaks the illusion for me when a movie is shot where it isn't set. I'm like, "What? They don't have pine trees in Austin."

EdwardDiego 3mo ago
I was watching a terrible movie, Wolverine, and the titular character is driving through Canada, we're told, and I found myself thinking that "huh, that bit of Canada looks a lot like New Zealand, interesting." Then he drives across a one-way bridge, and tracking shot above the car captures the big arrow New Zealand paints on the exit lane indicating you should drive in the *left* lane (started doing this after few too many tired tourists from RHD countries reverted to habit upon leaving a one-way bridge causing a head-on collision further down the road). They could've edited the arrow out, surely. TL;DR thought Canada in a movie looked like New Zealand, it was New Zealand.

g42gregory 3mo ago

With a very few exceptions, I don’t watch anything made past 2016. Not sure what happened in Hollywood then, but it’s just seems that they are constantly making some sort of public service messages that they need to pay me to watch. Not the other way around. That goes even if I agree with some of the messages.

biophysboy 3mo ago
There’s definitely didactic art made post 2016, but I wouldn’t write everything off beyond that date forever. Online review aggregators are less reliable for recent movies, so you might want to find individuals that you trust for >2016 recs, instead of algorithmic scores.
bradchris 3mo ago
I actually view 2012-2020 as peak “PSA messaging” era more, which a lot of people would probably coincide with the liberal optimism from Obama and course-correcting anxiety of Trump term 1. I think since covid Hollywood has “toned it down”, because the US has by and large moved on from that social phenomenon. I’ve been in Los Angeles for over a decade, and I disagree with the premise that Hollywood has some overarching plan to shape how we think— more people watch TikToks than movies and network TV. I view Hollywood, and the creators/writers/producers of films themselves, moreso holding up a mirror reflecting the current circumstances we’re in rather than manufacturing it out of nowhere.
quickthrowman 3mo ago
It was Netflix. Only the most milquetoast pablum gets made over there and it’s all shot with the same cameras and settings and it all looks the same and every idea is ripped from either an HBO show if it’s a series, or an older film if it’s a film. They sprayed Marvel content everywhere to my dismay, I can’t think of a less interesting universe or setting than “gritty version of reality except with superheroes”. Netflix hasn’t made a single TV show or film worth watching. It really killed filmmaking, I’ve only seen ~5 movies released since 2016: Parasite, Backrooms, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Get Out, Don’t Look Up. I watch plenty of movies, there are more great movies from the 1940s to 2010s than I’ll ever have time to watch. I hope interesting movies start being made again. Hollywood also went into sequel overdrive and released very few original properties and milked X-men, Harry Potter, Star Wars, etc. That didn’t help.

benzadeus 3mo ago

What about the woke movement and movies turning into politics?

rfwhyte 3mo ago

Something interesting to note, is that while "Hollywood" is fast losing its status as the nexus of the traditional film / tv industries, LA in the broader sense is already very well established as the global (Well at least "Western") hub of the content creator economy. Literally thousands of wannabe / up and coming YouTubers, Tik Tokers and "Influencers" of all sorts are packing up their lives and moving to LA every year in order to be closer to each other, and to the talent pool of cast-off film and tv folks that live in LA. The "Cost disease" seemingly hasn't yet infected that industry at least (Or the infection is still in its early incubating stage) though I think that's in large part due to the fact most of the content creators aren't working within the established industry framework, but rather are intentionally trying to work outside of it, in order to avoid paying union rates.

asdff 3mo ago
$10k rent on a hollywood hills mansion isn't so bad when you have it sleeping 10-15 20 year olds.

beloch 3mo ago

Blockbusters and tax credits started the trend, but green-screen filming sure accelerated it. Now that so many movies are almost entirely CG, it really doesn't matter where the green screen studio physically exists. The silver lining (for Americans) is that Hollywood movies are still very Hollywood. Canadian actors, Canadian crews, and Canadian filming facilities all combine to make utterly American films. If real locations are used, they're carefully chosen so that Vancouver stands in for New York, Calgary for Minnesota, etc.. Canadian references, accents, and values are all carefully erased. The one thing that seems to stay stubbornly American is the money people.

egberts1 3mo ago

Nowadays, we see movies being made deep on the heart of Texas!

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madrox 3mo ago

Tangential to this, I worked in Hollywood for a while. The studio I worked at had a gaggle of unpaid interns. There was a mix of normal kids and the sons/daughters of prominent Hollywood execs. I would agree, in many respects, that unpaid internships are glorified daycare. It isn't like a tech internship. No one gets a project to own. The reason these roles existed at all was because it didn't cost anything. Paying them would've required justifying the cost, and there was no way to justify these kids. I'd say interns were productive maybe 15% of the time. They just hung out and if you needed something done you didn't want to do, you could pull one to do it. Usually physical tasks (track down a wig) or internet research. Yes, they'd occassionally do coffee/lunch runs. In my experience, I found the nepo babies to be the least entitled workers. They never balked at what you asked them to do, and understood the assignment quickly. They had a great attitude. They often went beyond what you asked. By contrast, other interns usually had some kind of attitude about it or required way more hand holding. I was pretty surprised; common wisdom would lead you to expect the opposite. I looked them up recently, and many of them are doing small film stuff shooting in LA.

actionfromafar 3mo ago
Maybe those nepos actually were interested in the craft and came there by active choice?
- madrox 3mo ago
  Arguably everyone was. Certainly no one was doing it for the money. I suspect there is a myth among most people that executives -- especially Hollywood ones -- didn't get to that position by being smarter or harder working than others, or in doing so did not pass those qualities onto their children. Perhaps there is truth there, but I have yet to see it with my own eyes.
  - adithyassekhar 3mo ago
    I don’t think I have seen anyone wanting to be an actor because it’ll make them rich. It’s comes with the job and they are aware of it but that won’t be the motivation.

bawolff 3mo ago

> Perhaps I have gone to great lengths to prove something studio executives already know: the average viewer is not scrutinizing every frame for telltale glimpses of the Toronto skyline. Or you know, even knows what the toronto skyline looks like. I used to live in vancouver, tons of films are shot there. Unless they are pointing the camera at a famous landmark, i probably can't tell. If anything the forest is more of a give away then the city (if it looks like an alien planet in star trek ToS, then its LA. If it looks like an alien planet in stargate then its vancouver)

rossdavidh 3mo ago

"The end result is a peculiar version of Hollywood: a place increasingly devoid of physical production, populated instead by executives, AI art, and unpaid interns drag-racing golf carts through empty studio streets..." With the correct writer, that could be a cool indie movie, right there.

shermantanktop 3mo ago
So many movies about Hollywood...usually populated with a self-insert writer or director.

JimsonYang 3mo ago

I was talking to a guy who did hollywood financing- when you get a 40% tax credit from the national level plus a 3 mil tax break at the state level producers will gladly shift production especially when the financial realities of film are pretty tough

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llm_nerd 3mo ago

A good question to ask is why did Hollywood, as a centralized thing, ever exist in the first place? Cameras and equipment was expensive and not terribly mobile. Having a few studios and lots with the cameras and lights and rigs and so on gave you a huge advantage. From that a lot of the industry moved to an area, so it also had the network effect. People start getting lazy and want to commute to their latest project, so the whole #FilmInLA is compelling. That's disappearing. Rapidly. The idea that one place is where movies are made is comically obsolete. Talent is around the globe. Handheld cameras provide extraordinary quality and can work off the lighting of a candle. And honestly, Los Angeles is a stunningly boring city. And if the movie is invariably some navel gazing about it by its residents (always, always featuring long shots of people on highways or driving around, because every LA film has to jerkoff about driving), why should a film be filmed there? I'd infinitely prefer London, Paris, Toronto, Miami, Vancouver, Berlin, NYC, Chicago, rural areas, Rome, and so on. The world would be a better place if this sort of backwards, historic centralization was obliterated.

diogenescynic 3mo ago

Just like how Detroit stopped making cars and Silicon Valley no longer manufactures semiconductors. Seems like capitalism always finds a way to outsource those jobs in a race to the bottom for the lowest wages/taxes/regulation.

jmyeet 3mo ago

Corporations want a reproducible formula that can scale. Creating movies (and TV) is an inherently creative process. The people who end up running these businesses hate that but creativity doesn't scale. This is why reputation and track record is so important in getting any project greenlit. So the likes of Steven Spielberg, James Cameron or Christopher Nolan have a lot of freedom. They can't quite make what they want. A studio still has to bankroll the project and they may not like it. This is how Francis Ford Coppola ended up self-funding Megalopolis and, well, the studios were right to pass, let's be reeal. This is also why we get so many sequeals, remarks and reboots. It's a property with a proven track record. That's so much easier to get greenlit. The other thing that happens is that corporations (including studios) can only increase profits by cutting costs and raising prices. And this last one has basically killed the ecosystem upon which movies (and TV) depend. Let me explain. Once upon a time, LA was relativvely cheap to live in. This allowed people to live there and work on getting their break while working flexible, often service jobs. Waittressing, hosting, that sort of thing. It could be anything, really. But it has to be flexible enough to take time off to go to auditions and jobs and whatnot. It is very difficult to make a full-time career out of working in this industry. If you're an actor and you, say, get a principal guest role on a TV series you might make $1000-2000/day but you only end up working 1-2 days on that every 3 months. You can't live on that. Recently there was a piece on the actor who played Sam in Lord of the Rings having to sell his house even though he made $250k for the 3 movies. That was over several years. This isn't just for acting. Lighting, camera work, production, direction, editing, writing, special effects, costumes, etc etc etc. What sustained people were residuals and the relatively low cost of living. Residuals for TV basically got killed by streaming. A lot of movie projects became unsustainable when the VHS/DVD/Blu-ray revenue pipeline dried up. Matt Damon spoke about this. But the other thing streaming killed was the network TV pipeline. A bunch of screenplays would be written (and sold). I'm talking hundreds. A handful of those would be made into pilots. These days that's maybe 10-15 per year. Previously it was 50-100+. A certain number of those went to a half then full series order of 22+ episodes. Getting one job could sustain you for the year. Streaming came along. The residuals went away. Those 22 episode seasons became 8-12 episode seasons every 2-3 years if you're lucky. There was no syndication money anymore. Working people in the industry relied upon residuals in dry spells to make a living. And suddenly you needed 2-3 jobs a year instead of 1 and that's really difficult to get and, even if you get it, to schedule so they don't conflict. And then obviously ticket sales in movie theaters were in decline and fell off a cliff with the pandemic. Starting in the 2000s you had the shift to save costs to places like Atlanta, Vancouver and Toronto. Productions started chasing tax credits all over the world and would immediatley leave when they ended. Let me elaborate on just one example: writing. To get into this field you generally would start as a production assistant ("PA"). This would generally be an unpaid position initially (an "internship"). At some point if you didn't screw up, you might start getting paid. Then you'd be the assistant to a writer. This would give you experience in a writers room. Hopefully whoever you worked for would give you feedback and teach you things. The next step would be to get a staff writer job. Back in the day you'd get paid for 22 episodes. You'd be on set for filming and you'd learn production. Most producers came from a writing background. Eventually, this career would lead you to being a showrunner. Think Shonda Rhimes or Vince Gilligan or Matthew Weiner. Weiner in particular learned his craft and earned street cred as a staff writer on The Sopranos and he tried to sell Mad Men to HBO. Now what happens if you get hired to write 8 episodes instead of 22 so you'd getting one-third of the pay. Your job is over before shooting starts so none of these young writers are getting experience to become producers and ultimately showrunners. It's a bit like how some companies stop hiring juniors and just overwork seniors with the threat of layoffs. Well, those seniors used to be juniors. Don't hire and train juniors and eventually there won't be any seniors. Same thing. I guess the short version is: streaming killed Hollywood.

rbanffy 3mo ago

All change is mourned. This is nothing but market logic pursuing low costs, extracting work from gradients of wealth. In Hollywood the gradient is low compared to other “exotic” locations such as Toronto, Prague or Florida. This exodus will remain until production costs in LA fall below the costs in other places, or LA can offer a measurable benefit compared to other locations. Capitalism is a double edged sword - it allocates labor very efficiently, but when you are providing the labor, you don’t want to have that labor extracted from you too efficiently.

fxtentacle 3mo ago

“many of Hollywood’s problems can be traced back to a single economic theory of everything: the rent is too damn high.”