Hollywhere?
This year’s Oscars delivered a strong night for independents and Conan the best — I’m glad he’ll be back as the host next year. However, a different story has been simmering along Hollywood Boulevard recently, as film and television creators have scattered to the worldwide winds in search of, amongst other things, less expensive productions. At the dawn of the U.S. film industry, LA hosted ~ 82% of worldwide film productions, and as recently as 2018, it still represented roughly 50% of where all films were made. In 2024, that percentage stands at 26% and shrinking. What should be made of LA’s Hollywood heart starting to see other people?
LA and by proxy Hollywood have had a brutal half-decade. A series of adversarial forces, some of their own making (SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes) and others unavoidably external (covid-19 and wildfires), have punched a hole through the postcard perfect allure of La La Land. It’s a blow that’s laid low the area’s essential, aspirational function — in being the place where cinematic dreams are made:
While these difficulties may have served as accelerants, its clear that the diasporic spread of filming destinations was already underway before them and very likely would have continued without them. As the two charts below make clear. For Q4 2016, LA topped out at more than 10,000 shoot days. Fast forward to Q4 2024 and the total LA shoot days have declined by nearly 50%:
How did this happen? It’s cheaper to shoot outside of LA. Cheaper how? more generous tax incentives elsewhere.
In the past 10 years, many other states and entire countries have entered the competitive production tax incentives fray. What began as individual cities and jurisdictions leaning into the economic potential of movie tourism — the long-tail boost to local tourism activity that can result when a popular film features that locale — has evolved into broad and highly competitive tax incentive packages to lure productions of every size to shoot within their borders.
This map shows those in detail and the link to a series of interactive maps that drill-down to each detail for states and countries:
The breakdown of these packages, their evolution, and enormous influence deserves an entire post, but what it boils down to right now is the ability of a production to save (by taxation rebate) as much as 50% of an entire budget. That means, in relative terms, as much to a $1M indie as it does a $300M major studio film.
The devil is in the details for a specific project shipping out to the UK, Australia, Canada, or Texas, including things like budget caps and minimums and the various categories of incentive. The big picture truth though is that its not longer SoCal or nowhere for productions, as regional and international hubs continue emerge.
Clockwise from top-left: Monmouth, NJ, Yonkers, NY, Albuquerque, NM, Mexico City, Mexico, Perth, Australia, Borehamwood, UK, Long Island City, NY, Athens, GA, and Atlanta, GA.
At a glance, one could be forgiven for mistaking the above photo collage as a tour of LA’s Studio City. In fact, it represents major studio lots and sound stages far afield of LA and California, all built or having broken ground over the last two years. With studios investing major physical infrastructure in new locales, it seems this would be more permanent shift than passing trend.
An indie producer friend of mine has confirmed this shift in the day-to-day reality of pitching, producing, and completing everything from fortune 500 commercials to independent shorts:
“We’re down in Mexico City all the time now for shoots, and nearly as often in Toronto. The travel is a thing, but the infrastructure in terms of crews, spaces, and services has really built up in these locations and they matter in winning pitches for projects no doubt.”
So, this all may be a product of basic cost-benefit analysis. It proves out in a look back at LA’s past. The primary reason LA blossomed into Hollywood was the arrival at the turn of the century of eager, independent producers seeking freedom from the costly controls of Thomas Edison’s Motion Picture Patents Company. Having invented the first film cameras, Edison sought to force all subsequent productions to pay high licensing fees to use his equipment and to require his approval before beginning to shoot.
California was literally as far as they could get in country on land from the NJ-based patent offices and enforcers, as well as a place where labor was cheap, land was cheaper, and restrictions were basically non-existent. In the succeeding decades as studios, services, and talent relocated to SoCal permanently, it stayed that way, in relative terms, thanks to maintaining the most beneficial tax incentives to film and tv production. Until ten years ago, when other locales decided they could compete and their provincial governments agreed.
I have a few loosely connected thoughts at the end that I’m just going to put here…
Diversity through expansion is a good thing. Though many of these productions are flown in and out for the tax benefit, an expansion of popular and sustainable filming centers inevitably will lead to a diversification of voices and minds involved in those productions — from PAs to award-winning directors. It may not happen overnight, but anything that improves accessibility for newer and different participants, stories, and ideas is a positive.
LA-Hollywood is not going to disappear. It’s not as if California is removing or reducing its film and TV tax incentives. In the short-term, one can certainly argue that job creation in new production hubs is zero-sum for L.A. As new job opportunities emerge in Yonkers and Mexico City, that may mean fewer in L.A. But that’s only in the immediate short-term. The entertainment industry is still reacting to the aforementioned 5-year crippling of overall productions and so revenue shortfall as a result of fewer completed projects. That lower booked revenue has led to a contraction in newly green-lit productions. This too shall pass. Zooming out to a longer view of consumers’ insatiable appetites for content and the demonstrable ability of new technologies to gradually reduce the cost of production, suggests surplus work will be available in many production hubs. As long as there are new stories to tell.
Dorothy Parker once said that, “Los Angeles is 72 suburbs in search of a city.” Maybe due to its sprawling horizontal bounds or the absence of centuries of compiled cultural heritage, L.A. has long felt like a sort of geographic cypher. For a long time, this fit Hollywood like a glove. Where a city-as-cypher could frame the many cinematic stories created there. Perhaps in parallel with the emergence of new production hubs, a diminishing of novel narrative cinema made locally has turned the cypher on itself. The cypher of a cypher has given us endless the promulgation of reality tv and the preeminent trend of famous for being famous —both elevated to high consumption status over the preceding two decades. Much of this programming originated in and around Hollywood’s hills, depicting the high-end glitz and not much depth. If we’re being honest, its more Dorian Gray vapid than So Meta cool, and hardly emblematic of Hollywood’s cinematic highs.
The truth is, there are established cultures and existing identities tied to Los Angeles. In the long-ignored immigrant and minority communities, the vast majority of the city’s multi-generational population continues to proudly identify as angelenos. Maybe then, a cohesive way to call more productions back to LA would be to empower and involve those communities, as collaborators, casts, crews, storytellers and creators. A new sound stage-studio lot — one that employs local teams and maybe even has employee equity — Altadena seems like a great place to start.