Hollywood's Production Exodus: Where Movies Are Really Made Now
Hollywood Stopped Making Movies in Hollywood
The past decade has seen Hollywood's film and TV production migrate overseas, driven by blockbuster economics and tax incentives. This article quantifies the exodus, showing that larger budgets increasingly mean filming outside the US, often in cities like London, Atlanta, and Vancouver. It also examines the disconnect between where stories are set and where they're filmed, and whether audiences care. The author reflects on his own internship in an eerily empty Warner Bros. backlot, linking the trend to cost disease and the rising costs of living in LA.
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.
- datakan
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.
- dotBen
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.
- AlexB138
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.
- toast0
> 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...
- harrall
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.
- jmugan
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."
- vrosas
> 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.
- bsenftner
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.