The entertainment and film industry is losing serious ground in Hollywood as jobs are lost and production is scaled back even as the industry has seen growth elsewhere.
Hollywood has long been the entertainment capital of the U.S. — if not the world — as film, music, and TV converged on the area starting in the 1920s. But a new survey of jobs in the Los Angeles area shows that industry jobs have fallen to a low of 22 percent of the nation’s entertainment jobs, Business Insider reports.
The Hollywood Reporter, covering the same data from FilmLA, declared Los Angeles a “production graveyard” and warned: “Every category of filming for scripted content trails historical norms.”
The film industry has been migrating away from California for decades. Many TV productions, for instance, have long since fled to New York, Chicago, Georgia, and even Canada. And films have, as well.
But the Writers and actors strikes in 2023 only kicked that exodus into high gear.
“There really is a rise of the rest. You really didn’t see this in the jobs data until a little bit after the strikes. This is where things are really starting to pick up,” industry analyst Patrick Adler told Business Insider.
Adler added that the share of industry jobs outside L.A. has grown from 54 percent in 2022 to 69 percent today. This was not exactly a rise for overall industry jobs, either, as the market was relatively flat during that period, Adler explained. It was more because the jobs left L.A. and were relocated elsewhere.
There are several reasons for this state of affairs, and it reflects badly on both California in particular and the industry in general.
The industry is quickly descending into financial distress, for one, and new productions are facing severe budget cuts. This necessarily means that staying in California is financially difficult where costs are far higher than they are elsewhere.
L.A.’s cost of living is also extremely high, and that tends to drive employees to seek opportunity elsewhere. And when productions leave California, the employees are quick to follow.
The economic reality has left L.A. scrambling to entice the industry to return to the Golden State with offers of tax breaks and subsidies for the industry.
“California’s film incentive is a proven jobs creator that studies show provides a net positive return on every allocated dollar,” FilmLA’s president Paul Audley told Business Insider.
In June, the L.A. Times pointed out that industry employees have been struggling in L.A. but have found conditions to be better elsewhere.
Despite the city’s incentives, though, it seems unlikely that the industry can hit a new path to growth. The industry is contracting in other ways, too. Streamers and the big studios have begun slashing the number scripted shows and that trend does appear to be on the road to reversing any time soon as finances collapse industry wide.
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