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.
>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...
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...
> 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.
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.
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)?
In the next decade, AI will be gutting every industry associated with hollywood other than nvidia and tmsc.
>"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.
I wonder if this will change as Hollywood is eyeing three $1B+ box office earners back to back to back this summer
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?
A decent amount of odyssey was actually filmed on the universal backlot
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.
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.
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.
Why though? I thought Hollywood had their own accounting rules which always meant movies made a loss. What are they paying the tax on?