>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...

I wonder if this will change as Hollywood is eyeing three $1B+ box office earners back to back to back this summer

> For a major blockbuster, tax incentives equate to tens of millions of dollars, freeing up money for name-brand actors, elaborate set pieces, and unremarkable CGI effects.

Love the dig at the end.

I worked in Los Angeles doing animation and VFX software for 33 years, and left 5 years ago as the cost of living there made no sense, and my prospects for work became nomadic global chasing of work now taking place in countries with no or ignored labor laws. (As if labor laws are respected in the US anyway.)

Interesting in relation to the article, the author describes working out of the empty Warner Bros. lot; I lived across the street, right next to "The Starlite" (the author will recognize.)

Los Angeles and the entertainment industry's economics are brutal. My wife is exponentially more successful than I, a film she was the VFX producer for won an Oscar, she's an industry player, and still LA is too expensive.

In the next decade, AI will be gutting every industry associated with hollywood other than nvidia and tmsc.

>"If this has all drifted into bummertown, it’s because many of Hollywood’s problems can be traced back to a single economic theory of everything: the rent is too damn high. From there, everything else starts to unravel."

It's really understated just how much this is behind absolutely everything today. The only reason it became normal for SV software companies to pay 100k+ salaries to interns in the 2010s is because half of that had to be handed over to a landlord every month just to have people physically able to show up to your office. This is why Europe and Asia have completely dominated production of all the great AAA games over the last decade; when creative people can afford to live somewhere, all of the sudden you have the resources to truly focus on a product.

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.

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.

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.

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.