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.
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.
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.
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.
The whole tax incentive business is a big race to the bottom. Sports teams also abandon their taxpayer funded stadiums once somebody else offers a better deal.
I mean, the VFX part of the Film industry (and actual location shooting to some degree) has been chasing subsidies / tax credits since around 2002 with the Harry Potter movies that mostly were shot and produced (and more specifically the VFX were done in London, rather than in California) in the UK.
Since then Canada and the UK in particular (and NZ and Australia) have had various different fluctuations in subsidies for various parts of filming / doing post-production of movies over the intervening years.
Tax incentives these days include transferable tax credits. Even if your net tax rate was 0%, you can sell the credit to someone else, typically a bank. IOW, states and countries give you money, not simply give you a tax rate break.
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.
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.
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.
I presume that what happens is if a movie is too profitable, other business expenses are shifted to the ledger to reduce the profits. This works because a movie is not a separate accounting entity.
I'd say it is the size of the population, far far too many people try to make it in Los Angeles without any specialized educations, so the car washers have 40 people that dry your windows, and the wait staff jobs are exponentially Orwellian. When I finally moved away, I was living over an hour away from Santa Monica, paying $4K a month for rent, and the entire neighborhood lights up every night like a gangsters' paradise. Street racing, graffiti everywhere, sidewalk food vendors everywhere, the local high school kids are covered in tattoos, including their faces. No thank you.
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.
> 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.
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.
yeah this is what I heard from pretty much everyone in the business down there. since production has gone international LA can't compete with, say, Romania. You can ship out your must-haves and rely on locals for the rest, the savings are enormous.
There's some stuff you can still do in LA but a huge amount of actual shoot days are in countries with lower costs and fewer labor restrictions.
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)?
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.
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.
>"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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
We had a boom from 2010-2022, but post streaming era the gravity has moved to the UK and Eastern Europe.
Since then Canada and the UK in particular (and NZ and Australia) have had various different fluctuations in subsidies for various parts of filming / doing post-production of movies over the intervening years.
Everyone involved still pays their taxes, but the special purpose vehicle used to organize the production is essentially a passthrough entity.
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.
Love the dig at the end.
[0] _ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_The_Incredibles_charac...
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...
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...
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.
There's some stuff you can still do in LA but a huge amount of actual shoot days are in countries with lower costs and fewer labor restrictions.
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.
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.
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.
As someone not in the USA who loves movies, it is too easy to get sick of LA and desert locations everywhere.
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.
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.