A new report is claiming that Hollywood, once a land of hopes and dreams that embodied the spirit of ingenuity, creativity, and hard work, might be locked in a death spiral it can never escape from. There are a lot of different reasons this has happened, but chief among them is the continuing shift in how people consume entertainment.
The studio system, which has existed for ages, is having a difficult time responding to these changes and is failing to reinvent itself, especially with so many television and movie productions moving outside of California and even other countries in order to lower the cost of making movies and TV series. Productions moving out of the Golden State are leaving many employees who work on set, along with actors, without jobs.
The Pitt actor Noah Wyle recently provided testimony during a congressional hearing held in Burbank, California, saying that Hollywood is suffering “a near cratering of our once-thriving industry.” Hollywood has been hit with a massive 30% drop in employment since 2022, according to Labor Department data in Los Angeles.
According to a report from Breitbart, those who work behind the scenes have logged 36% fewer hours since that same year. Industry insiders have proposed a federal tax break to counter the tax incentives for filming projects in Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and many other countries that have led to a high volume of producers fleeing the U.S.
The state of California has already taken action to create its own tax breaks, but it hasn’t done much to keep productions from going elsewhere, mostly due to other costs that are still significantly higher in California than in other places like New York, Chicago, and Georgia. Much of the popular zombie apocalypse series The Walking Dead was filmed in Georgia near Atlanta as a means of keeping production costs down.
The report then notes that one of the biggest drivers for TV and film content since 2020 has been streaming services like Netflix and Disney+. However, by 2024, streamers quickly discovered that a constant stream of new shows weren’t doing much to improve their bottom line, so they reacted by reducing the number of productions being made. These cuts delivered additional blows to the dwindling Hollywood scene.
But again, the biggest pressure is coming from how consumers of entertainment are changing their habits. The main source of entertainment for folks today isn’t movies or TV shows, but both short and long-form content on YouTube and TikTok. Most of this content is produced by regular people or small production studios without a labor union.
"*" indicates required fields
In order for Hollywood to come back from the dead, its resurrection would need to include a shift away from small creators and social media, back to the “old ways,” and insiders feel it might be too late for that. “The nightmare scenario is playing out in Los Angeles, where a century-old entertainment economy is evaporating with no signs of a turnaround on the horizon. Many worry Hollywood will soon resemble Detroit after the decline of the auto industry, with corporate headquarters still located here, but little of the actual work,” the WSJ concluded.
Featured Image: screenshot from embedded video