How Hollywood stopped making movies in Hollywood

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.

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.

With the correct writer, that could be a cool indie movie, right there.

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

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.

Love the dig at the end.

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...

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.

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!

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...

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)

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.

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.

Simple one light is different in NYC and Toronto.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

As someone not in the USA who loves movies, it is too easy to get sick of LA and desert locations everywhere.