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.
A few days ago I visited the little picturesque town of Hope, British Columbia. While driving down the Main Street, I saw a dozen chainsaw carvings of wildlife. I thought, why does that one look like Rambo? Found out the first movie was filmed there in 1982. The movie took place in the fictional town of Hope, Washington. When the movie begins, you see Sylvester Stallone walking into town under the real “Welcome to Hope” sign that was in the Canadian town at that time.
Almost every time I see a Canadian character actor I guarantee the film or show was shot there. Shows like X-Files, BSG reboot, The Expanse.. all loaded with Canadian actors
Most of the Stargate series were filmed in Canada too. If you pay attention you'll realise the planets they visit all look like Canadian forest, or an old quarry filming location.
Even funnier is when actors and extras re-appear across series. Or the random extra has an unapologetically Canadian accent. Xfiles and SG1 are guilty of this.
Toronto's Roy Thomson Hall is always funny to see. It was Vought HQ in The Boys and UN headquarters in The Expanse while the show runs were overlapping.
I used to have a number of Hollywood studio clients and worked at a studio-adjacent company for a bit.
It's all about the tax incentives.
Georgia started the race by offering very generous (at the time) tax credits to pull production away from LA and NYC. It worked for a while, and Disney filmed most of its blockbusters there for 15 years. But the talent was unwilling to move to Atlanta, so the actual cost savings weren't that great. This meant Georgia had a U-shaped movie distribution: very low-budget straight-to-streaming-back-catalog crap using entirely local cast and crew, or really big budget movies. Very few middle-tier movies shot in Georgia.
Then London decided to get in on the act, and offered a ridiculously generous film tax incentive that applies to almost all film costs, not just the "below the line" costs (those related to actual production expenses, like crew, equipment, etc). The only catch was that the studio had to publicly disclose the movie's budget, but the incentive was so generous that studios were willing to play along. LA survived the initial blow, until the dual writer and actor strikes drew attention to the UK's non-existent labor protections, but Georgia was destroyed by London's incentive because its tax incentive was the only reason for Hollywood to film there (and filming in Georgia is down over 80% from its peak).
So then California decided to make its film incentive competitive again, nearly matching London's film incentive. But the geniuses in the state legislature wanted to spread the love, so the most competitive credit is only available outside of LA. Epic Fail #1. Worse, there's a fixed and relatively low annual cap for the film tax incentive, so only a handful of productions qualify each year. Epic fail #2. As a result, productions that don't qualify for the CA film tax credit generally go to London (for the incentive) or Vancouver (because everything is cheaper there even without incentives).
P.S. I was part of the downturn-related layoffs, so I no longer work in film or anything film-adjacent anymore.
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.
The failure of Camelot (1967) caused American filmmakers to shift exterior shots from studio backlots to authentic locations.[4] The film was widely criticized for its cheap look because it was obviously filmed on an architecturally ambiguous set against the chaparral-covered hills of Burbank.[4]
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.
This seems inevitable for most industries in the US (car/general manufacturing)
1. City/region becomes a boom-town based on a new high profit-margin industry
2. As that region becomes more wealthy, labor increases in price, thus there is more incentive to seek labor/resources for that industry outside the city/region
3. City/region hollows out of middle-class level jobs for the industry, retains ceremonial labor and executive offices.
Cape cod. In the 1980s the rich people had trouble getting their trash picked up because no one could afford to live within an hour of the wealthiest areas.
Jackson Hole HS alum here. It's been like that since at least the early 2000's. I commuted to school every morning from Alpine WY. I still have part dream part nightmares about it.
in film, it sounds like this is driven by government incentives/disincentives, not labor costs (see anecdotes in this thread about LA-based production crews flying around the world for filming)
It's also labor costs. It's far cheaper to get a crew, rent out space, etc in Eastern Europe, the US South, even the midwest, which is what led to films being made there. Government/tax incentives too of course.
Aging myself here but growing up in a "movie set city" (definitely not LA) in the 90's meant getting rerouted on the way to school because The Wire needed our block again. It's funny to see how the article shows this wasn't just a local annoyance back then, but an early sign of a much bigger, long running shift in where and how Hollywood actually makes movies.
NCIS used to use my English department building at University as their Hospital. Star Fleet Academy in one of the Star Trek movies was the front of my school's library.
Considering how much they did there it wasn't nearly as inconvenient as you would think. The school had a good process in place for controlling the chaos. It's still weird watching the movie and seeing my old library in it.
Shooting in Baltimore for a story that is about Baltimore is different than shooting in a different city as a stand-in for the city in the script though. That's just normal location shooting.
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.
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.
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.
Pretty clear, the Nepo babies don't understand the value of money. The interns who did realised they were being scammed being expected to work for free would of course would be hostile to doing anything other than the bare minimum to get something on their resume.
You referred to them an entitled but clearly they were not entitled to any financial compensation so who is really entitled here the workers or Hollywood expecting free Labour ?
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.
Sports teams are an interesting one because often times these things go on the ballot and people vote for that. So it looks like people and municipalities have varying reasons for keeping a team. That said sometimes it just doesn’t make business sense for a team to stay and other times a municipality decides it’s not worth the cost to keep a pro team.
In the case of the Chiefs, Jackson Co., MO voters voted not to fund a new stadium.
The reasoning was pretty simple: the Hunt family is worth $25 billion [0]. They could likely pay for any sort of improvements to Arrowhead, or to replace it altogether, without taxpayer funds, which comes from people in a metro area where the average income is on the lower side of things in a time when costs for everything keep going up.
On the other side of the state line, Kansas lawmakers specifically targeted the goal of moving two professional sports teams to the state using public funds called STAR bonds.
The end result is that the Kansas City metropolitan area will be spending, in total, about $3-4 billion to give the Hunt family a new place for their sports team to play, likely far away from the city center, and that Arrowhead needs to be torn down, which will cost at least tens of millions of dollars, once again, at taxpayer expense.
$3 billion could probably build out a real public transit system for the KC metro.
The crazy thing is that the best case is that the city will hopefully break even i all the promised benefits materialize. In most cases they don't. I bet if they hired a good VC to invest the same money into maybe 50 startups they would have a much higher change of a good ROI. But then the same people who accept sales tax increases for the sports team would probably be complaining about the tax burden.
I also don’t like subsidizing sports teams. To me it doesn’t make too much sense. Yes I know fans can be pretty loyal and sometimes that team is sort of like a pet dog. They love it through highs and lows. It’s something that can provide some identity to some as well as live vicariously through them. I get it but I feel sometimes you gotta let boyhood ideas and dreams go.
But hey sometimes people vote for their teams to stay despite the negative monetary ROI.
We have funny examples a little bit like "imagine FC Barça moving to Madrid" in the US. Used for comedy (but these are all real examples) from the opening monologue of the film BASEketball
> The Minneapolis Lakers moved to Los Angeles, where there are no lakes; the [Houston] Oilers moved to Tennessee, where there is no oil. The [New Orleans] Jazz moved to Salt Lake City, where they don't allow music.
Other names like that are
- the Baltimore Colts (named for Maryland's thoroughbred racing tradition) moving to Indianapolis (more known for open wheel auto racing),
- the Vancouver Grizzlies moving to Memphis, Tennessee (which never had Grizzlies even in the post-glacial period)
- the Brooklyn (Streetcar) Dodgers moving to Los Angeles in 1958 right when the LAMTA took over the few remaining street car lines before replacing them with buses in 1963.
The closest thing I can think of in European sports, and it's a stretch, is cycling teams. I picked this teams as the first example I could think of, not because it's some egregious example:
The parallel is that the name changes make tracking that team a real ship of Theseus problem: if the name, sponsors, riders, and staff turn over, is it worth calling it the same team? Similarly, if a football team changes cities, names, personnel, and owners, is it worth calling it the same team (Houston Oilers, Tennessee Oilers, Tennessee Titans)?
Happened once in English football: Wimbledon moved from south west london to the soulless new town of Milton Keynes.
It was radioactively controversial at the time, most fans never made the switch.
Eventually Wimbledon fans created a new club AFC Wimbledon who have since got promoted all the way to League One (the same league as MK Dons).
So the MK Dons owners ended up with nothing for all the trouble and they may as well have just made a new team. Nobody else has been stupid enough to try it since
It's a little weird but the teams and the sports leagues are basically just corporations that engage in show business. They have no real connection to where they are located.
Wimbledon FC moved from Wimbledon to Milton Keynes in the early 00's and quickly changed names to Milton Keynes Dons and AFC Wimbledon was created in it's place back in Wimbledon at their old stadium.
What has yet to be mentioned is why Hollywood, in the first place?
Out of the many reasons, one is quite simple: daylight. This used to be really important with film.
Historically, this was why efforts to move filming to somewhere like 'Scunthorpe, UK' didn't really work, despite tax fiddles, because you need light and some places just don't have it.
But this doesn't matter now, because film has moved on, there is no need to have a massive glowing unshielded nuclear fusion reactor, 93 million miles directly overhead, just to get some lens focused on some bits of silver halide.
My understanding is that an important consideration at the time was that it is very far from New Jersey.
Edison had a lot of early patents for film, and wanted to monopolize the industry.
Film makers in California were far enough away that it was inconvenient for Edison to sue them, both because it required sending people there in person, and because the district courts were favorable.
The irony here being that Netflix is currently in a massive layout to build a studio in NJ (like, 20 minutes from the old Bell Labs). Almost feels like giving that troll the finger!
I just saw the new Spider-Man movie and there were a ton of notices about Canada-based film credits and from various provinces, too. I'm not sure how these credits work, but maybe spreading the work out to various tax incentivized areas is the current play.
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.
Much of the VFX and CGI industry is already in India.
Movies and shows like Inception, Interstellar, Ex Machina, Tenet, Dune 1&2, Odyssey, Chernobyl, Foundation, and The Last of Us were VFXed in large part by Indian companies like Prime Focus, Makuta, Phanton, and their subsidiaries.
A number of these overlap with HPC and Distributed Systems with a number of major players in the space coming out of the GPU design space like Raja Koduri (AMD, Apple, Intel). Nvidia, AMD, Intel, Apple, and others having dedicated GPU design teams in India since the early 2000s also helped.
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.
There's also a separate LLC for the parent production company. The production company LLC can also send invoices to the individual movie LLC for services. People can get creative with production companies "overcharging" for various expenses back to the movie's LLC but whatever creative accounting they want to do still needs to ultimately satisfy IRS scrutiny if there's an audit. There are entertainment attorneys that specialize in movie LLCs.
> whatever creative accounting they want to do still needs to ultimately satisfy IRS scrutiny if there's an audit.
Well, yes, but avoiding taxes is not the point of "Hollywood Accounting", rather avoiding paying actors.
The IRS can collect taxes from whichever business entity makes a profit, but, critically, actors cannot. They signed a deal with one entity, and are only payed a share of net profits if that one particular entity makes a profit.
Hollywood Accounting, then, is the process of shifting costs around so that the legal entity responsible for paying the actors never makes a profit.
The SPVs never own anything and never have any expertise in anything. So they have to pay the parent company for a wide range of services, from advertising and marketing to distribution to prop and equipment rental. That makes it easy to shift costs into the SPV as necessary.
>Well, yes, but avoiding taxes is not the point of "Hollywood Accounting", rather avoiding paying actors.
I wasn't saying avoiding taxes was the purpose. Instead, I'm saying whatever "bogus" or "inflated" expenses that the production company LLC is charging to the movie LLC still has to be somewhat plausible. A simplistic example of what they can't do:
- Tom Cruise TC Productions LLC sends an invoice to MissionImpossible8 movie LLC with a single line item that says "script advisory service for $1 billion dollars" which then conveniently causes the movie's balance sheet to be negative $1 billion dollars and thus never make a profit.
The point is the production LLC, the distributor entities, etc all charging the movie LLC so that it shows zero profits ... still need to play their financial accounting games with more sophistication than that. Yes, go ahead and fabricate various costs to avoid paying actors on "net profit points" but it still needs a veneer of plausibility. Otherwise, the IRS comeback will be, "Is the $1 billion fee the real market rate for script advisory services? Do you have evidence of that amount ever being paid? etc etc"
Why would that matter if it's all still a subsidiary of Apple/Amazon/Disney/Comcast/Netflix/Sony?
The relevant taxing authorities would be concerned with the parent companies' financials, not the subsidiaries. Moving money from right hand to left hand doesn't change one's tax liabilities.
"Hollywood accounting" only refers to civil disputes due to insufficiently defined contracts between two businesses (usually actors and producers).
The benefit of “Hollywood accounting” isn’t necessarily tax avoidance; that’s what the tax credits are for. Rather, “Hollywood accounting” provides a way to avoid paying profit-based compensation.
That seems an incredibly generous description (or breathtakingly naive, but I'm giving the benefit of the doubt because hopefully most people aren't that credulous).
The point of Hollywood accounting is to intentionally create enough inflated expenses (billed from companies controlled by the studios or related parties of the producers etc.) to ensure that the net profit is zero or less, even when the film actually generated a lot of income.
It's true that tax gets paid eventually (and somewhere, maybe a tax haven) but it is intentionally creative accounting designed to minimise tax and screw people out of their royalties.
Those movies didn't lose money under GAAP. However, the specific legal entities that the talent made their profit deals with did not earn profits due to the way that revenues and expenses were allocated between the companies involved in making and distributing those films. For each of those films, at least one company was and is earning $$$, but the talent doesn't get to make a revenue sharing deal with those companies.
> For each of those films, at least one company was and is earning $$$, but the talent doesn't get to make a revenue sharing deal with those companies.
That doesn't sound right. Traditionally, and in particular in the case of Forrest Gump, the distinction is between people who contract for a percentage of net profit (always zero) and people who contract for a percentage of gross revenue. The revenue is measured at the same point either way; it's just about whether you got suckered or not.
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.
I'm not sure of the exact history, but it may have been copied from how affordable housing projects are subsidized at the Federal and state levels: https://sgp.fas.org/crs/misc/RS22389.pdf
Affordable housing tax credits are contingent on a tremendous amount of regulations and stipulations, including who ends up holding equity in the property (it's not easy to use these as passthrough vehicles to get personally rich), so the private lenders tend to be repeat players, often banks, who understand how to navigate the process. Among other things, I guess it's a way to outsource oversight, so that the government doesn't need to maintain a huge bureaucracy to police each and every development project. OTOH, the financing complexity comes at a cost; a significant fraction of the value of the tax credits pays for lawyers and accountants, rather than to actual construction.
I don't know if filmmaking subsidies are more lax or easier to game.
Also, I think using tax credit schemes, instead of direct payments, might be a way to obfuscate the cost of these programs from a legislative and political perspective; not unlike the Earned Income tax credit. Nominally speaking, tax credits reduce government revenues rather contribute to expenditures; the latter draws far more attention.
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.
1. Stagecraft/virtual production is a thing, yes, but the backgrounds are not "AI rendered," they're 3D scenes built in Unreal. They have to be, because they need to dynamically react to the camera moving to create parallax.
2. Yes, some people are using AI to plan scenes. With respect to your relative, those people are not the ones getting hired on large projects. When someone is hired in the film industry, they're hired for their specific taste, creative eye, and opinions. That contribution is literally their whole job. Outsourcing that task to AI is, within the industry, seen as an indication that someone is inexperienced or simply bad at their job.
Crews don't want to work for those people, and audiences don't want to watch content created that way.
3. It's easy to "expect" that "one day" AI might become the way movies are captured if you don't actually understand the limitations of AI video generation versus the demands of filmmakers and the expectations of audiences.
Putting aside the obvious stuff like continuity, shot duration, and resolution...GenAI is not color managed, it's not physically accurate, the results can't be copyrighted and it struggles with anything not in its training data (I.E., genuinely new ideas.)
This is NOT to say that this technology has no future in the film industry, obviously it does. But half the movies at the Oscars last year were shot on film, so the notion that all filmmaking is just going to turn into pixel soup being generated from prompts is just hilarious to everyone actually within the industry.
Stagecraft is just one implementation but you don't think that the Unreal 3D worlds that are used behind it are beginning to be generated with AI?
You're right that my relative probably isn't going to be at the top of the list to be hired for that work. He doesn't work in Hollywood level stuff and I also think that he knows he's going to have to fight to stay relevant and compete for the work that's available to him. Fortunately he's at the end of his career and his kids are adults. I think he can see the writing on the wall for his career either way.
Color management and maintaining context across multiple renders is actually the conversation we were talking about and the software that he is using has mechanisms to define context across a rendered shots and even across multiple projects. He just wasn't using them as it's an alien concept to him. My point is all of that is possible and solved and will become easier as the market matures.
I also have a friend who was significantly involved in Odyssey and I think the reason why so many films are made with film at the moment is because the industry is clinging on to what it believes is authentic when being pushed towards a commoditized race to the bottom.
As people stop paying to go to the cinema and Netflix demands tighter and tighter budgets for work, I think we will sadly see the end of this means of production because fewer and fewer people will want to pay for it.
The end goal of all of this is actually customized content where the film that I see and the film that you see is different because it's rendered to our tastes. There's a whole school of thought there around a collective experience versus an individual experience, but the technology will allow it if it's completely digitally created and one would assume that will be where it will go.
In other words, I might want Odyssey but framed as a horror filmed in noir and you might want Odyssey framed as a rom-com and the AI will just generate the version for us based on the original directors prompt. I actually think that's kind of sad, but that doesn't mean that isn't where things are going.
> Stagecraft is just one implementation but you don't think that the Unreal 3D worlds that are used behind it are beginning to be generated with AI?
They are not. Source: I have run one of these LED volume studios for 4 years.
> Color management and maintaining context across multiple renders is actually the conversation we were talking about and the software that he is using has mechanisms to define context across a rendered shots and even across multiple projects. He just wasn't using them as it's an alien concept to him. My point is all of that is possible and solved and will become easier as the market matures.
These problems are solved...ACES, DRT, FDL, etc. exist, are open, and AI companies are welcome to utilize them. But for some reason, they don't (or can't.)
> I also have a friend who was significantly involved in Odyssey and I think the reason why so many films are made with film at the moment is because the industry is clinging on to what it believes is authentic when being pushed towards a commoditized race to the bottom.
The reason people are still shooting on film is because it forces you to slow down and think about every decision, because mistakes become very costly. The decision to shoot on film objectively does not make technical sense, and studios would much prefer people shoot on cheaper digital cameras. But filmmakers still use it because of the specific creative mindset it requires of you.
> The end goal of all of this is actually customized content where the film that I see and the film that you see is different because it's rendered to our tastes. There's a whole school of thought there around a collective experience versus an individual experience, but the technology will allow it if it's completely digitally created and one would assume that will be where it will go.
The end goal...for who? Totally fine if this is something you want and interests you, but unless you have a time machine, this is just speculation.
Your last sentence there seems a little too 'high fantasy' for me. People want a shared experience. Talking about the Odyssey and saying "I liked it, but with the rom com lens" is not a unified experience. Also it kind of shits over the director's vision, which they probably won't stand for. The whole point of art is a framing of an idea. If you add these different lenses, you remove the framing; they become distinct things in and of themselves.
Who cares about Oscars? It's about sales and mind-share. Ticket sales still have not recovered to pre-COVID levels, and they were already in a severe downward trend before the pandemic.
The trend is that increasingly, the entertainment people consume comes from small-time creators. And these small creators have thus far had very little capacity to create truly visually appealing content and take on more ambitious works. And still, they've been taking mindshare from the movie industry.
Increasingly sophisticated experiences are becoming possible for these creators via AI tools. Where do you think this is going? Keep on laughing it up at your award ceremonies, but the audience is moving on.
Sure, but saying that AI is the magic bullet to solve this is completely speculative. If and when a fully GenAI film is released and performs well at the box office, than I'm sure the industry will align itself to the new direction. But pretending like that situation is an inevitability is just wishful thinking...any number of things could, or could not happen.
If that happens, I'll never watch a new movie or show again. I'm already hating a lot of Netflix-ified shows that pander to phone slaves with no attention span, so have stopped that dreck already. I have tens of thousands of hours of old films and shows to watch and would never finish before I die, so I am good.
I'm with you. When you think about it, what you call "Netflix-ified" demonstrates this race to the bottom started even before than Gen AI. People claimed Netflix produced shows and movies done "by algorithm", and in a way, this is the first kind of thing that can be replaced by AI, because it wasn't that good to begin with. Sadly.
I probably wouldn't try to adjust for both of those at once. You could ask whether inflation-adjusted revenue is up, you could ask whether per capita ticket sales are up, but I don't think the combined concept, whatever it might be, is very meaningful.
The reason behind what you say is that Hollywood is effectively out of ideas and does not usually make risks with original stories (and/or wills to pay good writers), with Neflix churning out movies since years which felt like AI generated before it was a thing.
If they fully embrace AI and turn tha already existing slop production to hypersonic speed, the audiences will even be less interested. At least the audiences in my bubble.
Visual sophistication is not the top reason to visit movies since CGI got so good. In the 2000s nice SFX was also a key reason t visit a theater. Nowadays the less SFX the more likely I will like a film. AI is just SFX.
The future is probably not 100% generated, but probably a mix of generation + animation + motion capture. AI is not going to be able to replicate the deep and affecting performances you get from humans—I fully believe it can recreate some aspects of the visual arts, but no way is it going to get to the point where it will be the best of the best. It may become good enough, which is a thing and will make an impact, but I think creatives will still want that kind of control.
And when we see the edges of that control, people will be interested in seeing things that make it "the old way," part of the reason you see a lot more practical effects these days, and I would include the background-in-unreal backdrops there, because they read as more real than actors in front of a green screen—for reasons that are totally unconscious unless you are highly trained in the differences.
While I do think gen AI is going to change how movies and TV shows get made, anyone telling you it will be a whole hog replacement has not studied the history of multimedia and probably hasn't made anything that required a high-level of vision themselves.
With a few notable exceptions (James Cameron) the film industry is largely unconcerned with "possibility." I think this is often why there is such a big misunderstanding from tech folks about how movies are made, since tech is very feature and tool driven whereas filmmaking is very much process-driven.
The Odyssey was shot on IMAX cameras half the size of a car that weighed 400lbs. It's easy to call that out as being ridiculous, surely a much smaller camera system could have achieved 99% the same results, etc. but that totally misses the point. Nolan could have shot it on anything he wanted, and he chose the less convenient way, because that is his process. If he was forced to use a more reasonable camera, it would not have been a Christopher Nolan film.
Sure, I'm down with that mix of generation + animation + mocap workflow. But at some point, people will going to look around at all the equipment, the people in mocap suits, the thousands of hours of generation and the millions of dollars of compute, and just wonder...wouldn't it be easier to just film someone with a real camera?
> Nolan could have shot it on anything he wanted, and he chose the less convenient way, because that is his process.
Kinda. There are also interesting technical reasons. From my lay person understanding:
1. IMAX film is physically larger and creates a higher quality image
2. Because of the size and machine noise close up dialog is normally redubbed.
3. Nolan (and team?) came up with a method of sealing off the cameras' noise that made them even larger, so they had a system of mirrors that allowed the actors to interact in a more natural way and allowed close in capture by IMAX with integrated sound.
The system of mirrors reminds me of Errol Morris' Interrotron which allowed him to film an interviewee's face directly from the perspective of the interviewer.
Nolan is irrelevant. He is the last of a dying breed. Once him and his ilk are gone, studios will go 100% into AI slop, Oscars be damned. No company is funneling 200 million into risky Oscar bait when they can make one hour Tiktok equivalents and get higher ROI. Movie theaters as a whole might go the Blockbuster route in a decade or two. The younger generations are not supporting the film industry with their eyeballs or dollars.
Someone else already replied to you politely explaining this from another angle, but for some reason you not to engage with him.
He is irrelevant to future trends, as should be clear from basic reading comprehension. And so what...? Tens of thousands of people, probably more, have worked in film. Each one of these is immune to criticism and an accurate futurist? My point remains, he engaged with every early comment except the polite one from xp84, which lays out the same general issue already.
How do you know Nolan is irrelevant to future trends? What's your expertise?
Your point most definitely does not remain. You're arguing with someone who knows his/her stuff. Your claim, which comes from no experience, directly contradicts what someone who works in the industry is telling you how it actually works!
The problem isnt that the future is going to be 100% AI driven, its that the cheap shit is going to be 100% AI driven and that's where new talent has to go to learn the ropes.
Like you mention James Cameron, and he is just one of hundreds of filmmakers who got their start with Roger Corman.
If the Roger Corman of tomorrow is budgeting 50 bucks + 1000000 AI tokens, you aren't going to get another James Cameron. The guy wont get a chance to make practical effects for a bunch of low budget practical films. We are already seeing this with CGI being so common.
>And when we see the edges of that control, people will be interested in seeing things that make it "the old way," part of the reason you see a lot more practical effects these days, and I would include the background-in-unreal backdrops there, because they read as more real than actors in front of a green screen—for reasons that are totally unconscious unless you are highly trained in the differences.
Yep, and we are already at the low end of people who can implement these techniques.
>has not studied the history of multimedia
Look at the animation quality of childrens media over the last 20 years. They have grabbed low quality CGI with both hands.
Remains to be seen. If you read the full thing from the copyright office they left a massive window open for anything with significant human involvement.
> half the movies at the Oscars last year were shot on film, so the notion that all filmmaking is just going to turn into pixel soup being generated from prompts
> audiences don't want to watch content created that way.
I want to point out a couple things. Not that I'd assert that you're wrong in basically your whole post. But...
Filmed movies and normal television programs aren't competing only with other content coming from (so-called) 'Hollywood studios.' They're competing for audience attention with all content, and to be thorough with any other activity people might get up to. The potential damage to (so-called) Hollywood is equal in these two scenarios:
1. 50% of films and TV shows shift production to AI-first: They use no real shots, they just motion capture a few actors and use AI and Unreal sets built primarily with AI and put the whole thing together digitally.
2. Of the time per week that people today spend watching films and TV, people shift 50% of that time to watching cheap, often-AI-produced junk on TikTok. Or for that matter, it doesn't even need to be AI-produced junk - it could just be influencers screwing around / ranting / doing sponsored content / etc.
Either way we lost 50% of the jobs. As for whether audiences want to watch that content, I'm starting to be concerned that we (human consumers) have lost most of our control here. Most people today consume content in a few ways:
1. Algorithmic feeds show us content, one item at a time, decided by a platform owner (Meta, Google/YouTube).
2. Streaming services. Again, algorithmic. You have to scroll like 12 sections down to get to "Resume Watching" - past 11 other carousels of What Platform Owner Wants You To See
Distant third: Movie theaters, but people usually go specifically to see a certain film. What movies you even know about hinges on either a platform owner deciding to show you a video discussing a movie, or ad spend. And some people block ads, and most others try their best to skip them - this is a far cry from the 90s, when movie ads were a staple of every commercial break. I used to at least know of every film in an 8-screen theater at all times, able to give a brief synopsis of the premise, just based on the linear TV advertising I saw.
Anyway just a long-winded way to say, don't underestimate the power of platform owners to force-feed us AI garbage and artificially generate "demand" if they decide that it's in their interest to - and this is exactly their playbook due to the cost savings potential. Same reason Spotify started padding their first-party playlists with AI slop.
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.
> If they don't want to make a movie properly, why make it at all?
Hollywood moves have little to do with art or even entrainment for that matter. They are simply revenue generating machines. Rich people invest in a movie production and expect a return. Hollywood moves don't take artistic risks anymore which is why franchises have become such a big thing. If it make money before, it will probably make money again. Even if it's bad, fans of the last movie will buy a ticket just to see. If it's bad, well, you have their money already!
It's pretty similar to Silicon valley these days. The technology is just a vehicle to produce a return on VC money.
It's the same forces driving software quality to the bottom. Simply put, enshittification has become the expected norm and there is more money to be made pushing out barely acceptable slop than the higher effort(and cost) of better made stuff.
Also, it's not exactly that the higher effort, better quality stuff is gone as it's been drowned out by the slop. Higher quality things are still being made(e.g. The Odyssey which uses minimal CGI), just much smaller as a percentage of overall.
Earlier unit economics of slop were roughly comparable to higher effort output. It was cheaper, but not dramatically so to push out crap code, so the volume of slop was a bit lower. Now, low effort slop is genuinely low effort due to AI, so the economics work out even accounting for the lower adoption and higher complaints from the users.
Time will tell if this is a temporary phase, or the new, bleak normal.
We've had low effort fraud for all of human history. We absolutely need to revise our definition of fraud to include AI slop. People need to wake the fuck up.
Nobody would accept a low quality product under any other circumstances, so why is AI different? We only have this large scale fascination with it because so many people are completely uneducated in computer science and have no clue how it works or what the limitations are.
90% of movies aren't shown at cinemas. 90% of movies are for home consumption. 90% of movies are Paw Patrol or some low rent action filler for Primes catalogue.
A lot of people, especially left leaning and young people, are very against any AI use and especially for AI pictures or video. For them it's very cringe-worthy. So that would all need to change somehow.
Remember that a lot of the people driving opinions on stuff are the artists that would be displaced by this technology.
Also... Actors aren't hired based on acting skill. AI can't replace the notoriety part of why studios hire actors.
I was at a Brazilian restaurant in the US that had TVs showing a well-known Brazilian singer/guitarist performing, and the middle-school-aged kids at the table next to me were discussing whether it was AI. It was clearly not, to me, but it seems to be getting hard for the next generation to tell it apart. I think they will be craving authentic experiences, but also willing to accept inauthentic ones when they do not have the money for the real thing.
I think you're right. I think there will be a giant "tock" back to real experiences. I'm 37, and the internet was new and novel during my formative years, so we flocked to it. Now, as it's becoming the old new thing, internet fatigue will lead to more and more "offline experiences." At least, it already has started to for me.
Things change, and people forget why they were ever any other way. There are definitely resistance forces, but when the overton window flips, people just accept the status quo again.
Honestly I hope people's distaste for AI generated content grows stronger. The existing mass media is bad and inauthentic enough, AI content is even worse...
I find myself mostly watching small creators on YouTube these days and only pay to watch a film if it's unusually good... But I never want to pay a cent to consume the output of some statistical model.
Once it’s good enough no one will care. A green room in Atlanta can become Venice Beach.
Actors will still be in demand, at least leads and most speaking roles. 3000 extras, that’s going to be AI.
My hope would be this allows for hyper small budget shows to rival what takes millions today. Maybe we can actually get some creative stories instead of Marvel slop fest 43
> My hope would be this allows for hyper small budget shows to rival what takes millions today.
No way. Small creatives will go elsewhere. Unless the structural "winner takes all" economy changes, small players will have no chance, especially when they have to use monopoly expensive tech.
Good writing already left hollywood, hollywood is already repetitive reboot factory.
I hope you’re right because I like the film industry a lot. But I worry this will be a repeat of the model versus cgi thing where many of the purists were converted by the cost to get the picture they can seen in their minds get made and seen by the masses.
I think you're wrong. A lot of people who dislike AI in art are putting their money (and their actions) where their mouth is. They don't buy stuff done with AI, ask authors whether they use it, and ban it/kick it from their communities. I've seen it and done it.
I can't tell you whether this will be sustained in the future, but it's disingenuous to claim it doesn't happen.
> YouTube starts shoving AI generated shorts into my feed every time I login
> Accidentally click every once in a while or out of perverse curiosity
Tech Industry logic: revealed preference shows that despite user's "legacy content preference signals" via ad partners, AI slop clickthrough has increased 500% this month, increase recommendations to 3/4 of timeline surface accordingly. Their hypocrisy has also been noted.
> AI can't replace the notoriety part of why studios hire actors.
I mean it probably can if a few famous actors license their likeness to be used in AI films. And it's probably only a matter of time until fully AI actors get marketed and licensed for use in AI films. I don't see a fundamental reason why AI actors couldn't build the same kind of notoriety and following.
As someone who originally comes from a field that cannot be consumed by AI anytime soon (food service. AI can't actually be eaten) it's insane watching tech-dorks think "nobody actually cares about what they buy, which is why they will suck down all this slop because ultimately they just want output".
Some of us remember the story of the Luddites and hope that this time might be different with 200 years of social progress.
so I hedged with "anytime soon" (we'll call it 5 years?) and also robot food production is not "AI" as "AI" is generally considered to be software (and the hardware that runs it I guess like the chips/data centers) and robots are hardware.
Also, how old is your cute youtube video? Isn't the fact that 99% of restaurants are still some dudes working on stoves and friers all these decades later proof that the technology isn't there (and can you prove it's price and not something else limiting uptake? Aside point, if I said "we can't go to Mars anytime soon" would a video of the moon landing disprove my statement in your mind/elicit "that's a cost not a technology problem"?)
Furthermore, if we're trying to extrapolate my statement out far enough to make it bad, wouldn't like Swanson's TV dinners be enough to show that I'm "wrong" that the food industry is largely automated/human free production? It sorta falls apart when we talk about food SERVICE which is the specific industry I was talking about (and which will never be killed by AI, because it's based in community and culture, things that you can't get a clanker to do).
McDonald's is perfectly fine food, depending on the problem you're solving for. If it's nutrition, you can do that. If it's affordability, you can probably do that. If it's availability, you can usually do that. If it's preferred flavor profiles, you may be able to do that. If it's moral issues, probably can't do that.
I worked in James Beard nominated restaurants and have eaten at 3 star restaurants, I have no qualms with fast food as food that couldn't be expanded to most of the industry.
Honestly I don't really see use of AI in films or music any worse than use in say programming. Actually even less so. Output is fixed and much easier to verify. So if it is reasonable and it sell why not go for it instead of expensive way things are now done.
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.
> 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.
Yes. Asian drama is already there.[1] The first AI-generated Asian vertical-format drama was released in November 2025. Now, about 400 new ones are released each day. The tools are online, and you can sign up for a few dollars a month.
Quality varies widely. The visuals are now quite good, but chatbots used to generate screenplays still have trouble holding the plot together. Much of this stuff looks like fan fiction authors are at the controls. When someone competent is driving, the results are quite good. Cost is about 10% of live action.
Hollywood probably has less than three years to live.
Can you link to a high quality example of a short drama?
The article mentions ShortMax's "Too Late! The Daughter of Olympus Forsakes You" and NetShort's "One Move God Mode". I found something on YouTube for both, but there's zero chance what I saw was Hollywood level quality (unless you really hate Hollywood movies!)
Most of these things have awful plots. As yet, the AI systems used are not very good at plotting. If given a screenplay and character sheets, they can do reasonably well. But the "generate a 60 episode drama from one prompt" jobs are not very good. This is more of a problem with the Asian drama industry than the technology. There are not that many different plots.
The visuals are consistently good now. If you put in a decent script, there's a good chance of getting something good. The script has to tell the characters what to emote. The automation isn't good at that yet. Nor are the vocals good at all.
Expensive movies are liked because they look impressive much more so than cheap movies. Say Titanic in past. Or Lord of The Rings. If AI can do the same they don't actually care if it was expensive or not.
>"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.
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.
> 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.
Well, it became normal because there were people (sometimes, but not always, the same people with significant holdings in the software companies) who held a lot of real estate and knew if they wanted that real estate to be more valuable, they'd need to force people to use it, meaning show up to work every day.
SV is the failure it is today because it concentrated all of the talent in one place needlessly. Something the rest of the country explicitly worked to not see happen.
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.
Over an hour away and paying $4k for that? I'm guessing you were renting an entire house. If we were talking 1br apartments you could be in santa monica for about half that today.
You're pretty propagandized. It's an international city that is the playground for the world's wealthy, no it is not the "Mexicans", it is the stupid dirty wealth. What I describe is an international event every night; you do not hear much English nor Mexican/Spanish, you hear every language on the planet.
Los Angeles has mountains/water on all sides so it can't grow in size.
It also utilizes the space extremely inefficiently. Single level single family houses everywhere and the rest is parking space. The few parks are difficult to access by kids arriving by foot/bike.
This is what results in the high rent: Can't grow supply and don't use existing land efficiently.
Look at Google Street maps: LA is a hellscape of concrete and asfalt. Lisbon and Amsterdam are much nicer and greener and they stil have higer density.
I don't think you can argue that California is significantly worse off in terms of housing than London, which is where a large number of productions go due to tax incentives.
Yeah, that's fine too. If it weren't fine, there wouldn't be increasing demand. If it became too lopsided and thus expensive to live there, it'd become less desirable. CA has plenty of cheaper cities too.
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.
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.
> He said something to the effect of immigration causing/keeping real estate high/unaffordable. This IS what is happening
Oh looking forward to some stats or estimates or some economic data then. Because it's well documented and known that California doesn't meet housing build targets unlike many cities in Texas which also have high immigration and yet have declining rents and home prices
> Next to me is a 6 unit building, all 2 bdrm units. Everyone is a recent immigrant from either Guatemala or Mexico
Oh okay anecdotes. Surely the actual hard evidence is coming later...
Okay, no evidence or economic stats or even theories at all. Wild. Zero grappling with why housing goes up in cost here vs down in other metro areas with similar high rates of immigration
> I work for Google and make relatively great money.
My God. You can work at Google and have your economic understanding of the world around you just be "I see a lot of immigrants. That must be the issue"
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.
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.
Raise wages, and hence costs, relative to non-union locations (a direct purpose of unions!); implement restrictive work rules; lead occasional strikes.
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.
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.
Films having a moral lesson for the audience is a weird thing to criticize when it's been done since time immortal—it's exceptional when a story doesn't have one. The fact that your cutoff is 2016 I think says more about what specific messages you're sensitive to rather than media containing more of them. I think cultural context is a big factor as well because you don't necessarily notice or react as strongly emotionally to what would have been considered controversial or on the nose at the time.
So like I think your experience is valid, and you're definitely noticing a real thing but I think it's better explained by you having more media literacy for contemporary topics and so you see the mirror being held up by these works way more obviously. Like I think about post 9/11 beginning of the Iraq war films and they're not even a little bit subtle.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think discovery via streaming services also contributes to bland sludge. Decisions are made based on a name, category, maybe an actor and a single "cover" art image.
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.
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!
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.
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.
My state, like many others, offers rather large tax credits to make films inside this state.
> the entertainment industry's economics are brutal
A large part of those economics are self-inflicted. The money is "loaned" to the production company at credit card rates with repayment from the receipts from theater viewing years later. Depending on how "big" the movie is, 95-100% of the box office receipts for the first 2 weeks of a theater run go back to the studio (so the movie theater survives on selling popcorn and stuff). This tapers down until the theaters get 100% of ticket sales about 2 months later. The last movie that theaters made profits from displaying was The Full Monty - it got a small release in 1997 but those theaters played the movie for months.
I worked with some guys who did special effects for movies & TV shows.
This sounds like the "360 contracts" that record companies require bands to sign. When bands are touring and getting an audience, they frequently sell CDs and T-shirts. The "360 contracts" require the band to give a percentage of that income to the record company and frequently require them to purchase CDs from the company at a higher-than-wholesale prices.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
> 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...
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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)
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
A few days ago I visited the little picturesque town of Hope, British Columbia. While driving down the Main Street, I saw a dozen chainsaw carvings of wildlife. I thought, why does that one look like Rambo? Found out the first movie was filmed there in 1982. The movie took place in the fictional town of Hope, Washington. When the movie begins, you see Sylvester Stallone walking into town under the real “Welcome to Hope” sign that was in the Canadian town at that time.
A staggering amount of film and TV is shot in Canada.
Almost every time I see a Canadian character actor I guarantee the film or show was shot there. Shows like X-Files, BSG reboot, The Expanse.. all loaded with Canadian actors
Most of the Stargate series were filmed in Canada too. If you pay attention you'll realise the planets they visit all look like Canadian forest, or an old quarry filming location.
Even funnier is when actors and extras re-appear across series. Or the random extra has an unapologetically Canadian accent. Xfiles and SG1 are guilty of this.
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0233304/?ref_=tt_cst_t_9&_ssoLoo...
Stargate Universe once, Atlantis twice, and SG-1 six times!
BSG is like this too. It’s all just forest, SFU, UBC, downtown.
Makes me want to move to BC :D
If you watch Jackie Chan's "Rumble in the Bronx" (shot in Vancouver) you can sometimes see the majestic Bronx Mountains in background shots.
Living in Vancouver ruins a lot of tv shows. Chicago? Nope, Vancouver. New York? Nope, Vancouver. SF? Nope, Vancouver!
On the flip side, they use a lot of local place names and things, so it’s like a little in-joke when you notice them.
"Vancouver never plays itself" as Tony Zhao and Taylor Ramos explain in on of their later Every Frame a Painting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojm74VGsZBU
> Living in Vancouver ruins a lot of tv shows. Chicago? Nope, Vancouver. New York? Nope, Vancouver. SF? Nope, Vancouver!
Also Toronto / southern Ontario.
If you see a city scene and there's streetcar tracks, it was probably shot in Toronto. See opening shot of this scene in Reacher s02e04:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MQQrvYjdbQ
Toronto's Roy Thomson Hall is always funny to see. It was Vought HQ in The Boys and UN headquarters in The Expanse while the show runs were overlapping.
“If you die in Canada, you die in real life!” https://m.xkcd.com/180/
I used to have a number of Hollywood studio clients and worked at a studio-adjacent company for a bit.
It's all about the tax incentives.
Georgia started the race by offering very generous (at the time) tax credits to pull production away from LA and NYC. It worked for a while, and Disney filmed most of its blockbusters there for 15 years. But the talent was unwilling to move to Atlanta, so the actual cost savings weren't that great. This meant Georgia had a U-shaped movie distribution: very low-budget straight-to-streaming-back-catalog crap using entirely local cast and crew, or really big budget movies. Very few middle-tier movies shot in Georgia.
Then London decided to get in on the act, and offered a ridiculously generous film tax incentive that applies to almost all film costs, not just the "below the line" costs (those related to actual production expenses, like crew, equipment, etc). The only catch was that the studio had to publicly disclose the movie's budget, but the incentive was so generous that studios were willing to play along. LA survived the initial blow, until the dual writer and actor strikes drew attention to the UK's non-existent labor protections, but Georgia was destroyed by London's incentive because its tax incentive was the only reason for Hollywood to film there (and filming in Georgia is down over 80% from its peak).
So then California decided to make its film incentive competitive again, nearly matching London's film incentive. But the geniuses in the state legislature wanted to spread the love, so the most competitive credit is only available outside of LA. Epic Fail #1. Worse, there's a fixed and relatively low annual cap for the film tax incentive, so only a handful of productions qualify each year. Epic fail #2. As a result, productions that don't qualify for the CA film tax credit generally go to London (for the incentive) or Vancouver (because everything is cheaper there even without incentives).
P.S. I was part of the downturn-related layoffs, so I no longer work in film or anything film-adjacent anymore.
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.
Before the 1990s CGI did not exist yet. You really had to film stuff outside.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Location_shooting
Seriously? Up to a certain point filming in studios and backlots was pretty much the norm.
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.
This seems inevitable for most industries in the US (car/general manufacturing)
1. City/region becomes a boom-town based on a new high profit-margin industry
2. As that region becomes more wealthy, labor increases in price, thus there is more incentive to seek labor/resources for that industry outside the city/region
3. City/region hollows out of middle-class level jobs for the industry, retains ceremonial labor and executive offices.
Cape cod. In the 1980s the rich people had trouble getting their trash picked up because no one could afford to live within an hour of the wealthiest areas.
Sounds like Jackson Hole in 2026
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGSn0AC3-ok
Jackson Hole HS alum here. It's been like that since at least the early 2000's. I commuted to school every morning from Alpine WY. I still have part dream part nightmares about it.
in film, it sounds like this is driven by government incentives/disincentives, not labor costs (see anecdotes in this thread about LA-based production crews flying around the world for filming)
It's also labor costs. It's far cheaper to get a crew, rent out space, etc in Eastern Europe, the US South, even the midwest, which is what led to films being made there. Government/tax incentives too of course.
>everyone else flies to whatever country offers the best tax breaks for them to film
once people are arranging plane tickets/charters, then they fly to the best place financially.
But LA/Hollywood.gov priced themselves out of the market first.
Is this Pioneertown, CA?
Agua Dulce.
That location was incredible in Nope!
Aging myself here but growing up in a "movie set city" (definitely not LA) in the 90's meant getting rerouted on the way to school because The Wire needed our block again. It's funny to see how the article shows this wasn't just a local annoyance back then, but an early sign of a much bigger, long running shift in where and how Hollywood actually makes movies.
NCIS used to use my English department building at University as their Hospital. Star Fleet Academy in one of the Star Trek movies was the front of my school's library.
Considering how much they did there it wasn't nearly as inconvenient as you would think. The school had a good process in place for controlling the chaos. It's still weird watching the movie and seeing my old library in it.
Shooting in Baltimore for a story that is about Baltimore is different than shooting in a different city as a stand-in for the city in the script though. That's just normal location shooting.
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.
My guess is that they had a better understanding of the social aspect of the industry (or work in general).
They were there make a good impression and build connections
I think there’s a lot to that. Hollywood is very relationship driven.
Maybe those nepos actually were interested in the craft and came there by active choice?
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.
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.
Pretty clear, the Nepo babies don't understand the value of money. The interns who did realised they were being scammed being expected to work for free would of course would be hostile to doing anything other than the bare minimum to get something on their resume.
You referred to them an entitled but clearly they were not entitled to any financial compensation so who is really entitled here the workers or Hollywood expecting free Labour ?
There are resumes and there is reputation. One or the other can matter more depending on industry, and if people call the references.
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.
Yep. See the Kansas City Chiefs.
Clark Hunt is the largest recipient of welfare in the entire region.
Sports teams are an interesting one because often times these things go on the ballot and people vote for that. So it looks like people and municipalities have varying reasons for keeping a team. That said sometimes it just doesn’t make business sense for a team to stay and other times a municipality decides it’s not worth the cost to keep a pro team.
In the case of the Chiefs, Jackson Co., MO voters voted not to fund a new stadium.
The reasoning was pretty simple: the Hunt family is worth $25 billion [0]. They could likely pay for any sort of improvements to Arrowhead, or to replace it altogether, without taxpayer funds, which comes from people in a metro area where the average income is on the lower side of things in a time when costs for everything keep going up.
On the other side of the state line, Kansas lawmakers specifically targeted the goal of moving two professional sports teams to the state using public funds called STAR bonds.
The end result is that the Kansas City metropolitan area will be spending, in total, about $3-4 billion to give the Hunt family a new place for their sports team to play, likely far away from the city center, and that Arrowhead needs to be torn down, which will cost at least tens of millions of dollars, once again, at taxpayer expense.
$3 billion could probably build out a real public transit system for the KC metro.
[0] https://sports.yahoo.com/meet-25-billion-hunt-family-2024104...
The crazy thing is that the best case is that the city will hopefully break even i all the promised benefits materialize. In most cases they don't. I bet if they hired a good VC to invest the same money into maybe 50 startups they would have a much higher change of a good ROI. But then the same people who accept sales tax increases for the sports team would probably be complaining about the tax burden.
I also don’t like subsidizing sports teams. To me it doesn’t make too much sense. Yes I know fans can be pretty loyal and sometimes that team is sort of like a pet dog. They love it through highs and lows. It’s something that can provide some identity to some as well as live vicariously through them. I get it but I feel sometimes you gotta let boyhood ideas and dreams go.
But hey sometimes people vote for their teams to stay despite the negative monetary ROI.
What is weird to me as a European is that sports teams in the US can move. Can you imagine FC Barcelona moving to Madrid?
We have funny examples a little bit like "imagine FC Barça moving to Madrid" in the US. Used for comedy (but these are all real examples) from the opening monologue of the film BASEketball
> The Minneapolis Lakers moved to Los Angeles, where there are no lakes; the [Houston] Oilers moved to Tennessee, where there is no oil. The [New Orleans] Jazz moved to Salt Lake City, where they don't allow music.
Other names like that are
- the Baltimore Colts (named for Maryland's thoroughbred racing tradition) moving to Indianapolis (more known for open wheel auto racing),
- the Vancouver Grizzlies moving to Memphis, Tennessee (which never had Grizzlies even in the post-glacial period)
- the Brooklyn (Streetcar) Dodgers moving to Los Angeles in 1958 right when the LAMTA took over the few remaining street car lines before replacing them with buses in 1963.
The closest thing I can think of in European sports, and it's a stretch, is cycling teams. I picked this teams as the first example I could think of, not because it's some egregious example:
1984–1986 Kwantum–Decosol
1987–1989 Superconfex–Yoko
1990–1992 Buckler–Colnago
1993–1994 WordPerfect
1995 Novell
1996–2012 Rabobank
2013 Blanco
2013–2014 Belkin
2015–2018 LottoNL–Jumbo
2019–2023 Jumbo–Visma
2024– Visma–Lease a Bike
via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visma%E2%80%93Lease_a_Bike_(me.... Also note that the team was newly formed from a schism in TI–Raleigh, where the other half of the riders went to Panasonic.
The parallel is that the name changes make tracking that team a real ship of Theseus problem: if the name, sponsors, riders, and staff turn over, is it worth calling it the same team? Similarly, if a football team changes cities, names, personnel, and owners, is it worth calling it the same team (Houston Oilers, Tennessee Oilers, Tennessee Titans)?
Happened once in English football: Wimbledon moved from south west london to the soulless new town of Milton Keynes.
It was radioactively controversial at the time, most fans never made the switch.
Eventually Wimbledon fans created a new club AFC Wimbledon who have since got promoted all the way to League One (the same league as MK Dons).
So the MK Dons owners ended up with nothing for all the trouble and they may as well have just made a new team. Nobody else has been stupid enough to try it since
It's a little weird but the teams and the sports leagues are basically just corporations that engage in show business. They have no real connection to where they are located.
Wimbledon FC moved from Wimbledon to Milton Keynes in the early 00's and quickly changed names to Milton Keynes Dons and AFC Wimbledon was created in it's place back in Wimbledon at their old stadium.
People are also pretty fucking dumb and vote for stadia instead of schools, parks, and libraries.
What has yet to be mentioned is why Hollywood, in the first place?
Out of the many reasons, one is quite simple: daylight. This used to be really important with film.
Historically, this was why efforts to move filming to somewhere like 'Scunthorpe, UK' didn't really work, despite tax fiddles, because you need light and some places just don't have it.
But this doesn't matter now, because film has moved on, there is no need to have a massive glowing unshielded nuclear fusion reactor, 93 million miles directly overhead, just to get some lens focused on some bits of silver halide.
My understanding is that an important consideration at the time was that it is very far from New Jersey.
Edison had a lot of early patents for film, and wanted to monopolize the industry.
Film makers in California were far enough away that it was inconvenient for Edison to sue them, both because it required sending people there in person, and because the district courts were favorable.
The irony here being that Netflix is currently in a massive layout to build a studio in NJ (like, 20 minutes from the old Bell Labs). Almost feels like giving that troll the finger!
A hundred years ago they were practically giving away land in LA. The real estate value has flipped.
You, uh, you're not from New Jersey are you? I promise you, we're not giving away land around here.
Central NJ (if you believe it exists) is cheaper depending on the particular town but yeah, not being given away by any means.
https://www.zillow.com/home-values/11267/edison-nj/ https://www.zillow.com/home-values/12447/los-angeles-ca/
Might be opposite sides of the country but CA and NJ are lock step when it comes to making it unaffordable for younger generations to buy homes.
Why Hollywood?
Because Edison and Patents in New York which was the original centre for filmmaking in America.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_Picture_Patents_Company...
I too have experienced the light of Scunthorpe. ‘The skies reflect our labours’ as they say ;)
I just saw the new Spider-Man movie and there were a ton of notices about Canada-based film credits and from various provinces, too. I'm not sure how these credits work, but maybe spreading the work out to various tax incentivized areas is the current play.
Film in Atlanta has dropped significantly.
We had a boom from 2010-2022, but post streaming era the gravity has moved to the UK and Eastern Europe.
Not that you're wrong, but I could have sworn that Marvel production was always based in the UK.
Post-production is very much still in California though.
https://discoveratlanta.com/stories/things-to-do/atlantas-ma...
Atlanta did a lot of the big ones.
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.
Nobody really wins in a race to the bottom
soon they will be filming in mumbai. already setup for movie making.
Much of the VFX and CGI industry is already in India.
Movies and shows like Inception, Interstellar, Ex Machina, Tenet, Dune 1&2, Odyssey, Chernobyl, Foundation, and The Last of Us were VFXed in large part by Indian companies like Prime Focus, Makuta, Phanton, and their subsidiaries.
A number of these overlap with HPC and Distributed Systems with a number of major players in the space coming out of the GPU design space like Raja Koduri (AMD, Apple, Intel). Nvidia, AMD, Intel, Apple, and others having dedicated GPU design teams in India since the early 2000s also helped.
Why is this downvoted? Is it wrong?
Why though? I thought Hollywood had their own accounting rules which always meant movies made a loss. What are they paying the tax on?
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.
>This works because a movie is not a separate accounting entity.
Each movie is set up as a separate legal business entity (LLC). That's the SPV (special purpose vehicle). https://www.google.com/search?q=each+hollywood+movie+is+a+se...
There's also a separate LLC for the parent production company. The production company LLC can also send invoices to the individual movie LLC for services. People can get creative with production companies "overcharging" for various expenses back to the movie's LLC but whatever creative accounting they want to do still needs to ultimately satisfy IRS scrutiny if there's an audit. There are entertainment attorneys that specialize in movie LLCs.
> whatever creative accounting they want to do still needs to ultimately satisfy IRS scrutiny if there's an audit.
Well, yes, but avoiding taxes is not the point of "Hollywood Accounting", rather avoiding paying actors.
The IRS can collect taxes from whichever business entity makes a profit, but, critically, actors cannot. They signed a deal with one entity, and are only payed a share of net profits if that one particular entity makes a profit.
Hollywood Accounting, then, is the process of shifting costs around so that the legal entity responsible for paying the actors never makes a profit.
The SPVs never own anything and never have any expertise in anything. So they have to pay the parent company for a wide range of services, from advertising and marketing to distribution to prop and equipment rental. That makes it easy to shift costs into the SPV as necessary.
>Well, yes, but avoiding taxes is not the point of "Hollywood Accounting", rather avoiding paying actors.
I wasn't saying avoiding taxes was the purpose. Instead, I'm saying whatever "bogus" or "inflated" expenses that the production company LLC is charging to the movie LLC still has to be somewhat plausible. A simplistic example of what they can't do:
- Tom Cruise TC Productions LLC sends an invoice to MissionImpossible8 movie LLC with a single line item that says "script advisory service for $1 billion dollars" which then conveniently causes the movie's balance sheet to be negative $1 billion dollars and thus never make a profit.
The point is the production LLC, the distributor entities, etc all charging the movie LLC so that it shows zero profits ... still need to play their financial accounting games with more sophistication than that. Yes, go ahead and fabricate various costs to avoid paying actors on "net profit points" but it still needs a veneer of plausibility. Otherwise, the IRS comeback will be, "Is the $1 billion fee the real market rate for script advisory services? Do you have evidence of that amount ever being paid? etc etc"
Why would that matter if it's all still a subsidiary of Apple/Amazon/Disney/Comcast/Netflix/Sony?
The relevant taxing authorities would be concerned with the parent companies' financials, not the subsidiaries. Moving money from right hand to left hand doesn't change one's tax liabilities.
"Hollywood accounting" only refers to civil disputes due to insufficiently defined contracts between two businesses (usually actors and producers).
The benefit of “Hollywood accounting” isn’t necessarily tax avoidance; that’s what the tax credits are for. Rather, “Hollywood accounting” provides a way to avoid paying profit-based compensation.
That seems an incredibly generous description (or breathtakingly naive, but I'm giving the benefit of the doubt because hopefully most people aren't that credulous).
The point of Hollywood accounting is to intentionally create enough inflated expenses (billed from companies controlled by the studios or related parties of the producers etc.) to ensure that the net profit is zero or less, even when the film actually generated a lot of income.
It's true that tax gets paid eventually (and somewhere, maybe a tax haven) but it is intentionally creative accounting designed to minimise tax and screw people out of their royalties.
Movies like Forrest Gump, Return of the Jedi, Men in Black or Harry Potter 5 all managed to lose money, according to "GAAP".
If that's not creative accounting, I don't know what is.
Those movies didn't lose money under GAAP. However, the specific legal entities that the talent made their profit deals with did not earn profits due to the way that revenues and expenses were allocated between the companies involved in making and distributing those films. For each of those films, at least one company was and is earning $$$, but the talent doesn't get to make a revenue sharing deal with those companies.
> For each of those films, at least one company was and is earning $$$, but the talent doesn't get to make a revenue sharing deal with those companies.
That doesn't sound right. Traditionally, and in particular in the case of Forrest Gump, the distinction is between people who contract for a percentage of net profit (always zero) and people who contract for a percentage of gross revenue. The revenue is measured at the same point either way; it's just about whether you got suckered or not.
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.
What kind of dystopian fuckery is that?
It reminds me of the eBay market in bulk lots of used scratch-offs harvested from the trash:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/robertwood/2016/01/14/powerball...
I'm not sure of the exact history, but it may have been copied from how affordable housing projects are subsidized at the Federal and state levels: https://sgp.fas.org/crs/misc/RS22389.pdf
Affordable housing tax credits are contingent on a tremendous amount of regulations and stipulations, including who ends up holding equity in the property (it's not easy to use these as passthrough vehicles to get personally rich), so the private lenders tend to be repeat players, often banks, who understand how to navigate the process. Among other things, I guess it's a way to outsource oversight, so that the government doesn't need to maintain a huge bureaucracy to police each and every development project. OTOH, the financing complexity comes at a cost; a significant fraction of the value of the tax credits pays for lawyers and accountants, rather than to actual construction.
I don't know if filmmaking subsidies are more lax or easier to game.
Also, I think using tax credit schemes, instead of direct payments, might be a way to obfuscate the cost of these programs from a legislative and political perspective; not unlike the Earned Income tax credit. Nominally speaking, tax credits reduce government revenues rather contribute to expenditures; the latter draws far more attention.
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
Man, this is so misguided....
1. Stagecraft/virtual production is a thing, yes, but the backgrounds are not "AI rendered," they're 3D scenes built in Unreal. They have to be, because they need to dynamically react to the camera moving to create parallax.
2. Yes, some people are using AI to plan scenes. With respect to your relative, those people are not the ones getting hired on large projects. When someone is hired in the film industry, they're hired for their specific taste, creative eye, and opinions. That contribution is literally their whole job. Outsourcing that task to AI is, within the industry, seen as an indication that someone is inexperienced or simply bad at their job. Crews don't want to work for those people, and audiences don't want to watch content created that way.
3. It's easy to "expect" that "one day" AI might become the way movies are captured if you don't actually understand the limitations of AI video generation versus the demands of filmmakers and the expectations of audiences. Putting aside the obvious stuff like continuity, shot duration, and resolution...GenAI is not color managed, it's not physically accurate, the results can't be copyrighted and it struggles with anything not in its training data (I.E., genuinely new ideas.)
This is NOT to say that this technology has no future in the film industry, obviously it does. But half the movies at the Oscars last year were shot on film, so the notion that all filmmaking is just going to turn into pixel soup being generated from prompts is just hilarious to everyone actually within the industry.
Stagecraft is just one implementation but you don't think that the Unreal 3D worlds that are used behind it are beginning to be generated with AI?
You're right that my relative probably isn't going to be at the top of the list to be hired for that work. He doesn't work in Hollywood level stuff and I also think that he knows he's going to have to fight to stay relevant and compete for the work that's available to him. Fortunately he's at the end of his career and his kids are adults. I think he can see the writing on the wall for his career either way.
Color management and maintaining context across multiple renders is actually the conversation we were talking about and the software that he is using has mechanisms to define context across a rendered shots and even across multiple projects. He just wasn't using them as it's an alien concept to him. My point is all of that is possible and solved and will become easier as the market matures.
I also have a friend who was significantly involved in Odyssey and I think the reason why so many films are made with film at the moment is because the industry is clinging on to what it believes is authentic when being pushed towards a commoditized race to the bottom.
As people stop paying to go to the cinema and Netflix demands tighter and tighter budgets for work, I think we will sadly see the end of this means of production because fewer and fewer people will want to pay for it.
The end goal of all of this is actually customized content where the film that I see and the film that you see is different because it's rendered to our tastes. There's a whole school of thought there around a collective experience versus an individual experience, but the technology will allow it if it's completely digitally created and one would assume that will be where it will go.
In other words, I might want Odyssey but framed as a horror filmed in noir and you might want Odyssey framed as a rom-com and the AI will just generate the version for us based on the original directors prompt. I actually think that's kind of sad, but that doesn't mean that isn't where things are going.
> Stagecraft is just one implementation but you don't think that the Unreal 3D worlds that are used behind it are beginning to be generated with AI?
They are not. Source: I have run one of these LED volume studios for 4 years.
> Color management and maintaining context across multiple renders is actually the conversation we were talking about and the software that he is using has mechanisms to define context across a rendered shots and even across multiple projects. He just wasn't using them as it's an alien concept to him. My point is all of that is possible and solved and will become easier as the market matures.
These problems are solved...ACES, DRT, FDL, etc. exist, are open, and AI companies are welcome to utilize them. But for some reason, they don't (or can't.)
> I also have a friend who was significantly involved in Odyssey and I think the reason why so many films are made with film at the moment is because the industry is clinging on to what it believes is authentic when being pushed towards a commoditized race to the bottom.
The reason people are still shooting on film is because it forces you to slow down and think about every decision, because mistakes become very costly. The decision to shoot on film objectively does not make technical sense, and studios would much prefer people shoot on cheaper digital cameras. But filmmakers still use it because of the specific creative mindset it requires of you.
> The end goal of all of this is actually customized content where the film that I see and the film that you see is different because it's rendered to our tastes. There's a whole school of thought there around a collective experience versus an individual experience, but the technology will allow it if it's completely digitally created and one would assume that will be where it will go.
The end goal...for who? Totally fine if this is something you want and interests you, but unless you have a time machine, this is just speculation.
Your last sentence there seems a little too 'high fantasy' for me. People want a shared experience. Talking about the Odyssey and saying "I liked it, but with the rom com lens" is not a unified experience. Also it kind of shits over the director's vision, which they probably won't stand for. The whole point of art is a framing of an idea. If you add these different lenses, you remove the framing; they become distinct things in and of themselves.
Who cares about Oscars? It's about sales and mind-share. Ticket sales still have not recovered to pre-COVID levels, and they were already in a severe downward trend before the pandemic.
The trend is that increasingly, the entertainment people consume comes from small-time creators. And these small creators have thus far had very little capacity to create truly visually appealing content and take on more ambitious works. And still, they've been taking mindshare from the movie industry.
Increasingly sophisticated experiences are becoming possible for these creators via AI tools. Where do you think this is going? Keep on laughing it up at your award ceremonies, but the audience is moving on.
Sure, but saying that AI is the magic bullet to solve this is completely speculative. If and when a fully GenAI film is released and performs well at the box office, than I'm sure the industry will align itself to the new direction. But pretending like that situation is an inevitability is just wishful thinking...any number of things could, or could not happen.
If that happens, I'll never watch a new movie or show again. I'm already hating a lot of Netflix-ified shows that pander to phone slaves with no attention span, so have stopped that dreck already. I have tens of thousands of hours of old films and shows to watch and would never finish before I die, so I am good.
I'm with you. When you think about it, what you call "Netflix-ified" demonstrates this race to the bottom started even before than Gen AI. People claimed Netflix produced shows and movies done "by algorithm", and in a way, this is the first kind of thing that can be replaced by AI, because it wasn't that good to begin with. Sadly.
Your information about ticket sales is out of date. This year is on track to outsell pre Covid years.
Adjusted for inflation and population?
I probably wouldn't try to adjust for both of those at once. You could ask whether inflation-adjusted revenue is up, you could ask whether per capita ticket sales are up, but I don't think the combined concept, whatever it might be, is very meaningful.
The reason behind what you say is that Hollywood is effectively out of ideas and does not usually make risks with original stories (and/or wills to pay good writers), with Neflix churning out movies since years which felt like AI generated before it was a thing.
If they fully embrace AI and turn tha already existing slop production to hypersonic speed, the audiences will even be less interested. At least the audiences in my bubble.
Visual sophistication is not the top reason to visit movies since CGI got so good. In the 2000s nice SFX was also a key reason t visit a theater. Nowadays the less SFX the more likely I will like a film. AI is just SFX.
The future is probably not 100% generated, but probably a mix of generation + animation + motion capture. AI is not going to be able to replicate the deep and affecting performances you get from humans—I fully believe it can recreate some aspects of the visual arts, but no way is it going to get to the point where it will be the best of the best. It may become good enough, which is a thing and will make an impact, but I think creatives will still want that kind of control.
And when we see the edges of that control, people will be interested in seeing things that make it "the old way," part of the reason you see a lot more practical effects these days, and I would include the background-in-unreal backdrops there, because they read as more real than actors in front of a green screen—for reasons that are totally unconscious unless you are highly trained in the differences.
While I do think gen AI is going to change how movies and TV shows get made, anyone telling you it will be a whole hog replacement has not studied the history of multimedia and probably hasn't made anything that required a high-level of vision themselves.
With a few notable exceptions (James Cameron) the film industry is largely unconcerned with "possibility." I think this is often why there is such a big misunderstanding from tech folks about how movies are made, since tech is very feature and tool driven whereas filmmaking is very much process-driven.
The Odyssey was shot on IMAX cameras half the size of a car that weighed 400lbs. It's easy to call that out as being ridiculous, surely a much smaller camera system could have achieved 99% the same results, etc. but that totally misses the point. Nolan could have shot it on anything he wanted, and he chose the less convenient way, because that is his process. If he was forced to use a more reasonable camera, it would not have been a Christopher Nolan film.
Sure, I'm down with that mix of generation + animation + mocap workflow. But at some point, people will going to look around at all the equipment, the people in mocap suits, the thousands of hours of generation and the millions of dollars of compute, and just wonder...wouldn't it be easier to just film someone with a real camera?
> Nolan could have shot it on anything he wanted, and he chose the less convenient way, because that is his process.
Kinda. There are also interesting technical reasons. From my lay person understanding:
The system of mirrors reminds me of Errol Morris' Interrotron which allowed him to film an interviewee's face directly from the perspective of the interviewer.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interrotron
I swear I watched a 1930s hollywood film where a guy died inside the box they built to soundproof the camera.
It was Babylon (2022), which takes place in 1930s Hollywood
Thats it yep.
> half the size of a car that weighed 400lbs
Link please - saw nothing like that from a quick search
https://www.reddit.com/r/cinematography/comments/1p2exyx/che...
Nolan is irrelevant. He is the last of a dying breed. Once him and his ilk are gone, studios will go 100% into AI slop, Oscars be damned. No company is funneling 200 million into risky Oscar bait when they can make one hour Tiktok equivalents and get higher ROI. Movie theaters as a whole might go the Blockbuster route in a decade or two. The younger generations are not supporting the film industry with their eyeballs or dollars.
Someone else already replied to you politely explaining this from another angle, but for some reason you not to engage with him.
> Nolan is irrelevant
Irrelevant to whom? He's not irrelevant to me and many movie fans.
Also, you are lecturing someone who seems to actually work or has worked on the movie industry.
He is irrelevant to future trends, as should be clear from basic reading comprehension. And so what...? Tens of thousands of people, probably more, have worked in film. Each one of these is immune to criticism and an accurate futurist? My point remains, he engaged with every early comment except the polite one from xp84, which lays out the same general issue already.
How do you know Nolan is irrelevant to future trends? What's your expertise?
Your point most definitely does not remain. You're arguing with someone who knows his/her stuff. Your claim, which comes from no experience, directly contradicts what someone who works in the industry is telling you how it actually works!
The problem isnt that the future is going to be 100% AI driven, its that the cheap shit is going to be 100% AI driven and that's where new talent has to go to learn the ropes.
Like you mention James Cameron, and he is just one of hundreds of filmmakers who got their start with Roger Corman.
If the Roger Corman of tomorrow is budgeting 50 bucks + 1000000 AI tokens, you aren't going to get another James Cameron. The guy wont get a chance to make practical effects for a bunch of low budget practical films. We are already seeing this with CGI being so common.
>And when we see the edges of that control, people will be interested in seeing things that make it "the old way," part of the reason you see a lot more practical effects these days, and I would include the background-in-unreal backdrops there, because they read as more real than actors in front of a green screen—for reasons that are totally unconscious unless you are highly trained in the differences.
Yep, and we are already at the low end of people who can implement these techniques.
>has not studied the history of multimedia
Look at the animation quality of childrens media over the last 20 years. They have grabbed low quality CGI with both hands.
AI can make the scene in 3D. If I can't today it can tomorrow
https://x.com/mattshumer_/status/2081100592689324502?s=20
https://x.com/karpathy/status/2083749667410727319
even without AI you can see the progression of procedural geneartion which shows one path (of many) the AI can take
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A4qpjZ2SkJQ
>the results can't be copyrighted
Remains to be seen. If you read the full thing from the copyright office they left a massive window open for anything with significant human involvement.
> half the movies at the Oscars last year were shot on film, so the notion that all filmmaking is just going to turn into pixel soup being generated from prompts
> audiences don't want to watch content created that way.
I want to point out a couple things. Not that I'd assert that you're wrong in basically your whole post. But...
Filmed movies and normal television programs aren't competing only with other content coming from (so-called) 'Hollywood studios.' They're competing for audience attention with all content, and to be thorough with any other activity people might get up to. The potential damage to (so-called) Hollywood is equal in these two scenarios:
1. 50% of films and TV shows shift production to AI-first: They use no real shots, they just motion capture a few actors and use AI and Unreal sets built primarily with AI and put the whole thing together digitally.
2. Of the time per week that people today spend watching films and TV, people shift 50% of that time to watching cheap, often-AI-produced junk on TikTok. Or for that matter, it doesn't even need to be AI-produced junk - it could just be influencers screwing around / ranting / doing sponsored content / etc.
Either way we lost 50% of the jobs. As for whether audiences want to watch that content, I'm starting to be concerned that we (human consumers) have lost most of our control here. Most people today consume content in a few ways:
1. Algorithmic feeds show us content, one item at a time, decided by a platform owner (Meta, Google/YouTube).
2. Streaming services. Again, algorithmic. You have to scroll like 12 sections down to get to "Resume Watching" - past 11 other carousels of What Platform Owner Wants You To See
Distant third: Movie theaters, but people usually go specifically to see a certain film. What movies you even know about hinges on either a platform owner deciding to show you a video discussing a movie, or ad spend. And some people block ads, and most others try their best to skip them - this is a far cry from the 90s, when movie ads were a staple of every commercial break. I used to at least know of every film in an 8-screen theater at all times, able to give a brief synopsis of the premise, just based on the linear TV advertising I saw.
Anyway just a long-winded way to say, don't underestimate the power of platform owners to force-feed us AI garbage and artificially generate "demand" if they decide that it's in their interest to - and this is exactly their playbook due to the cost savings potential. Same reason Spotify started padding their first-party playlists with AI slop.
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.
> If they don't want to make a movie properly, why make it at all?
Hollywood moves have little to do with art or even entrainment for that matter. They are simply revenue generating machines. Rich people invest in a movie production and expect a return. Hollywood moves don't take artistic risks anymore which is why franchises have become such a big thing. If it make money before, it will probably make money again. Even if it's bad, fans of the last movie will buy a ticket just to see. If it's bad, well, you have their money already!
It's pretty similar to Silicon valley these days. The technology is just a vehicle to produce a return on VC money.
It's the same forces driving software quality to the bottom. Simply put, enshittification has become the expected norm and there is more money to be made pushing out barely acceptable slop than the higher effort(and cost) of better made stuff.
Also, it's not exactly that the higher effort, better quality stuff is gone as it's been drowned out by the slop. Higher quality things are still being made(e.g. The Odyssey which uses minimal CGI), just much smaller as a percentage of overall.
Earlier unit economics of slop were roughly comparable to higher effort output. It was cheaper, but not dramatically so to push out crap code, so the volume of slop was a bit lower. Now, low effort slop is genuinely low effort due to AI, so the economics work out even accounting for the lower adoption and higher complaints from the users.
Time will tell if this is a temporary phase, or the new, bleak normal.
The acceptance of the slop is the problem.
We've had low effort fraud for all of human history. We absolutely need to revise our definition of fraud to include AI slop. People need to wake the fuck up.
Nobody would accept a low quality product under any other circumstances, so why is AI different? We only have this large scale fascination with it because so many people are completely uneducated in computer science and have no clue how it works or what the limitations are.
90% of movies aren't shown at cinemas. 90% of movies are for home consumption. 90% of movies are Paw Patrol or some low rent action filler for Primes catalogue.
What is "proper movie making?"
A lot of people, especially left leaning and young people, are very against any AI use and especially for AI pictures or video. For them it's very cringe-worthy. So that would all need to change somehow.
Remember that a lot of the people driving opinions on stuff are the artists that would be displaced by this technology.
Also... Actors aren't hired based on acting skill. AI can't replace the notoriety part of why studios hire actors.
I was at a Brazilian restaurant in the US that had TVs showing a well-known Brazilian singer/guitarist performing, and the middle-school-aged kids at the table next to me were discussing whether it was AI. It was clearly not, to me, but it seems to be getting hard for the next generation to tell it apart. I think they will be craving authentic experiences, but also willing to accept inauthentic ones when they do not have the money for the real thing.
I think you're right. I think there will be a giant "tock" back to real experiences. I'm 37, and the internet was new and novel during my formative years, so we flocked to it. Now, as it's becoming the old new thing, internet fatigue will lead to more and more "offline experiences." At least, it already has started to for me.
Things change, and people forget why they were ever any other way. There are definitely resistance forces, but when the overton window flips, people just accept the status quo again.
Honestly I hope people's distaste for AI generated content grows stronger. The existing mass media is bad and inauthentic enough, AI content is even worse...
I find myself mostly watching small creators on YouTube these days and only pay to watch a film if it's unusually good... But I never want to pay a cent to consume the output of some statistical model.
>Also... Actors aren't hired based on acting skill. AI can't replace the notoriety part of why studios hire actors.
This.
The reason Tom Holland and Matt Damon are in a Greek myth film is because they put bums in seats and give Nolan extra money to work with.
And AI lookalikes arent a guaranteed success either. Robert Bronzi hasn't been able to revive interest in Charles Bronson.
Once it’s good enough no one will care. A green room in Atlanta can become Venice Beach.
Actors will still be in demand, at least leads and most speaking roles. 3000 extras, that’s going to be AI.
My hope would be this allows for hyper small budget shows to rival what takes millions today. Maybe we can actually get some creative stories instead of Marvel slop fest 43
> My hope would be this allows for hyper small budget shows to rival what takes millions today.
No way. Small creatives will go elsewhere. Unless the structural "winner takes all" economy changes, small players will have no chance, especially when they have to use monopoly expensive tech.
Good writing already left hollywood, hollywood is already repetitive reboot factory.
I hope you’re right because I like the film industry a lot. But I worry this will be a repeat of the model versus cgi thing where many of the purists were converted by the cost to get the picture they can seen in their minds get made and seen by the masses.
Actions matter more than words. Sure, they're complaining about AI, but consuming AI content more and more.
It's a bit like people who complain that everything on the news is always bad. Everyone hates it, yet it's what everyone consumes.
I think you're wrong. A lot of people who dislike AI in art are putting their money (and their actions) where their mouth is. They don't buy stuff done with AI, ask authors whether they use it, and ban it/kick it from their communities. I've seen it and done it.
I can't tell you whether this will be sustained in the future, but it's disingenuous to claim it doesn't happen.
> a lot
The data disagrees.
You don’t get to handwaive away without citing data.
TLDR: content is AI generated whether you think it is, or not.
https://news.adobe.com/news/2026/06/creators-toolkit-report-...
https://manuscriptreport.com/data/ai-publishing-statistics
https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.05711
https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.09865
> AI can't replace the notoriety part of why studios hire actors.
I mean it probably can if a few famous actors license their likeness to be used in AI films. And it's probably only a matter of time until fully AI actors get marketed and licensed for use in AI films. I don't see a fundamental reason why AI actors couldn't build the same kind of notoriety and following.
> I don't see a fundamental reason why AI actors couldn't build the same kind of notoriety and following.
Can AI's trash a room at Hotel Marmont? Dump their girlfriends when said girlfriends turn 25? Become Scientologists?
As someone who originally comes from a field that cannot be consumed by AI anytime soon (food service. AI can't actually be eaten) it's insane watching tech-dorks think "nobody actually cares about what they buy, which is why they will suck down all this slop because ultimately they just want output".
Some of us remember the story of the Luddites and hope that this time might be different with 200 years of social progress.
> As someone who originally comes from a field that cannot be consumed by AI anytime soon (food service)...
That's a cost problem, not a technology problem.[1]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Xop9py8zBY
so I hedged with "anytime soon" (we'll call it 5 years?) and also robot food production is not "AI" as "AI" is generally considered to be software (and the hardware that runs it I guess like the chips/data centers) and robots are hardware.
Also, how old is your cute youtube video? Isn't the fact that 99% of restaurants are still some dudes working on stoves and friers all these decades later proof that the technology isn't there (and can you prove it's price and not something else limiting uptake? Aside point, if I said "we can't go to Mars anytime soon" would a video of the moon landing disprove my statement in your mind/elicit "that's a cost not a technology problem"?)
Furthermore, if we're trying to extrapolate my statement out far enough to make it bad, wouldn't like Swanson's TV dinners be enough to show that I'm "wrong" that the food industry is largely automated/human free production? It sorta falls apart when we talk about food SERVICE which is the specific industry I was talking about (and which will never be killed by AI, because it's based in community and culture, things that you can't get a clanker to do).
>food service
>nobody actually cares about what they buy, which is why they will suck down all this slop
McDonald's exists?
McDonald's is perfectly fine food, depending on the problem you're solving for. If it's nutrition, you can do that. If it's affordability, you can probably do that. If it's availability, you can usually do that. If it's preferred flavor profiles, you may be able to do that. If it's moral issues, probably can't do that.
I worked in James Beard nominated restaurants and have eaten at 3 star restaurants, I have no qualms with fast food as food that couldn't be expanded to most of the industry.
Honestly I don't really see use of AI in films or music any worse than use in say programming. Actually even less so. Output is fixed and much easier to verify. So if it is reasonable and it sell why not go for it instead of expensive way things are now done.
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.
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.
> 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.
Yes. Asian drama is already there.[1] The first AI-generated Asian vertical-format drama was released in November 2025. Now, about 400 new ones are released each day. The tools are online, and you can sign up for a few dollars a month.
Quality varies widely. The visuals are now quite good, but chatbots used to generate screenplays still have trouble holding the plot together. Much of this stuff looks like fan fiction authors are at the controls. When someone competent is driving, the results are quite good. Cost is about 10% of live action.
Hollywood probably has less than three years to live.
[1] https://pinedrama.com/blog/paradigm-shift-ai-short-drama-rev...
> Hollywood probably has less than three years to live.
"Probably" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.
Can you link to a high quality example of a short drama?
The article mentions ShortMax's "Too Late! The Daughter of Olympus Forsakes You" and NetShort's "One Move God Mode". I found something on YouTube for both, but there's zero chance what I saw was Hollywood level quality (unless you really hate Hollywood movies!)
Most of these things have awful plots. As yet, the AI systems used are not very good at plotting. If given a screenplay and character sheets, they can do reasonably well. But the "generate a 60 episode drama from one prompt" jobs are not very good. This is more of a problem with the Asian drama industry than the technology. There are not that many different plots.
The visuals are consistently good now. If you put in a decent script, there's a good chance of getting something good. The script has to tell the characters what to emote. The automation isn't good at that yet. Nor are the vocals good at all.
Give it six months.
Here's a half-decent example.[1] The visuals are good, the plot is adequate, and the audio is poor.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5w1jiTYrTw
Thank you: definitely interesting. I'm unsure what I would compare it to.
Any idea of the production cost?
Was it originally released as episodes?
I'm currently reading David Copperfield which was serialized as 20 monthly installments - which had side-effects.
abominable
People want to see expensive effort in movies they have to buy tickets to see and AI is the opposite of effort.
Expensive movies are liked because they look impressive much more so than cheap movies. Say Titanic in past. Or Lord of The Rings. If AI can do the same they don't actually care if it was expensive or not.
AI isn't going to be able to replace AAA CGI for a very long time. We are in the Tron era
It's not a forthcoming disruption. They've been using "AI" for various visual effects tasks for a long time already.
If something is not being done using AI now, it's because the results are poor, not because of some sort of reluctance to embrace it.
Practical effects still beat CGI most of the time. AI doesn’t help with that.
AI may replace classic CGI
> he is already transferring his skills as a camera operator into prompting
Thanks for the laugh.
[dead]
>"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.
Cue https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-every...
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.
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.
I think there is a huge aspirational factor here too. A lot of people think "I will be rich one day".
People also feel secure if they have wealth, even if its assets that are illiquid. If you sell your house you have to buy another or pay rent.
> 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.
Well, it became normal because there were people (sometimes, but not always, the same people with significant holdings in the software companies) who held a lot of real estate and knew if they wanted that real estate to be more valuable, they'd need to force people to use it, meaning show up to work every day.
SV is the failure it is today because it concentrated all of the talent in one place needlessly. Something the rest of the country explicitly worked to not see happen.
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.
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.
Over an hour away and paying $4k for that? I'm guessing you were renting an entire house. If we were talking 1br apartments you could be in santa monica for about half that today.
Is that really how LA central is these days, the mexicans and the hood taking over?
You're pretty propagandized. It's an international city that is the playground for the world's wealthy, no it is not the "Mexicans", it is the stupid dirty wealth. What I describe is an international event every night; you do not hear much English nor Mexican/Spanish, you hear every language on the planet.
4k rent for that environment?
Los Angeles has mountains/water on all sides so it can't grow in size.
It also utilizes the space extremely inefficiently. Single level single family houses everywhere and the rest is parking space. The few parks are difficult to access by kids arriving by foot/bike.
This is what results in the high rent: Can't grow supply and don't use existing land efficiently.
Density: LA = 8,210/sq mi, Lisbon = 17,040/sq mi, Paris = 10,100/sq mi, Amsterdam = 13,670/sq mi, Copenhagen = 19,195/sq mi. (from wikipedia)
Look at Google Street maps: LA is a hellscape of concrete and asfalt. Lisbon and Amsterdam are much nicer and greener and they stil have higer density.
I don't think you can argue that California is significantly worse off in terms of housing than London, which is where a large number of productions go due to tax incentives.
Cities don't need ever-increasing populations to thrive.
Both populations and supply can remain static as demand pushes up prices and swaps lower earners for high net worth people.
Classic supply/demand.
Yeah, that's fine too. If it weren't fine, there wouldn't be increasing demand. If it became too lopsided and thus expensive to live there, it'd become less desirable. CA has plenty of cheaper cities too.
The flood of immigrants into California inevitably pushes up housing prices.
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.
Lol. Imagining someone sneaking across the border from Mexico so they can work under the table to afford a $4k/mo 1BR in Hollywood
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.
> He said something to the effect of immigration causing/keeping real estate high/unaffordable. This IS what is happening
Oh looking forward to some stats or estimates or some economic data then. Because it's well documented and known that California doesn't meet housing build targets unlike many cities in Texas which also have high immigration and yet have declining rents and home prices
> Next to me is a 6 unit building, all 2 bdrm units. Everyone is a recent immigrant from either Guatemala or Mexico
Oh okay anecdotes. Surely the actual hard evidence is coming later...
Okay, no evidence or economic stats or even theories at all. Wild. Zero grappling with why housing goes up in cost here vs down in other metro areas with similar high rates of immigration
> I work for Google and make relatively great money.
My God. You can work at Google and have your economic understanding of the world around you just be "I see a lot of immigrants. That must be the issue"
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.
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.
Ok, what part then?
Raise wages, and hence costs, relative to non-union locations (a direct purpose of unions!); implement restrictive work rules; lead occasional strikes.
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.
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.
Films having a moral lesson for the audience is a weird thing to criticize when it's been done since time immortal—it's exceptional when a story doesn't have one. The fact that your cutoff is 2016 I think says more about what specific messages you're sensitive to rather than media containing more of them. I think cultural context is a big factor as well because you don't necessarily notice or react as strongly emotionally to what would have been considered controversial or on the nose at the time.
So like I think your experience is valid, and you're definitely noticing a real thing but I think it's better explained by you having more media literacy for contemporary topics and so you see the mirror being held up by these works way more obviously. Like I think about post 9/11 beginning of the Iraq war films and they're not even a little bit subtle.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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_charac...
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.
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.
Probably still more expensive and with less concentrated talent than the other places outside the US.
>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...
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.
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.
I think discovery via streaming services also contributes to bland sludge. Decisions are made based on a name, category, maybe an actor and a single "cover" art image.
AKA "Love of money is the root of all evil."
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.
$10k rent on a hollywood hills mansion isn't so bad when you have it sleeping 10-15 20 year olds.
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!
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.
My 70-something mother loves youtube.
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.
My state, like many others, offers rather large tax credits to make films inside this state.
> the entertainment industry's economics are brutal
A large part of those economics are self-inflicted. The money is "loaned" to the production company at credit card rates with repayment from the receipts from theater viewing years later. Depending on how "big" the movie is, 95-100% of the box office receipts for the first 2 weeks of a theater run go back to the studio (so the movie theater survives on selling popcorn and stuff). This tapers down until the theaters get 100% of ticket sales about 2 months later. The last movie that theaters made profits from displaying was The Full Monty - it got a small release in 1997 but those theaters played the movie for months.
I worked with some guys who did special effects for movies & TV shows.
>so the movie theater survives on selling popcorn and stuff)
Apparently some of those profits now go to the studio too? Some of the deals being made sound borderline criminal to me.
This sounds like the "360 contracts" that record companies require bands to sign. When bands are touring and getting an audience, they frequently sell CDs and T-shirts. The "360 contracts" require the band to give a percentage of that income to the record company and frequently require them to purchase CDs from the company at a higher-than-wholesale prices.
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.
> encountered Epstein-class people doing what they do with the children of their own staff
kind of glossing over something pretty major
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.
Obsession was shot entirely in Burbank for chump change.
Makes me wonder who actually lives in LA now. Or rather who can live there and afford to pay bills.
Besides millionaires from Santa Monica and homeless from downtown.
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.
"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.
So many movies about Hollywood...usually populated with a self-insert writer or director.
> 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...
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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
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.
They are still building new soundstages as we speak.
Sure but I meant now they are making more than before they might not be as cost sensitive going forward
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.
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
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
In the next decade, AI will be gutting every industry associated with hollywood other than nvidia and tmsc.
Nowadays, we see movies being made deep on the heart of Texas!
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.
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.
> 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)
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.
“many of Hollywood’s problems can be traced back to a single economic theory of everything: the rent is too damn high.”
Because of financial incentives. And it makes critics sad when films aren’t shot where their story is based. Saved you reading it.
What about the woke movement and movies turning into politics?
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.
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.
A lot of non-LA/desert scenes are LA sets.
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.
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)
omg project hail marry, what a dumb story, they reduced an intelligent life form to a human pet dog.