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- The historic Los Angeles fires dealt another blow to local film crews who were already struggling to find work.
- Motion picture industry payrolls averaged around 100,000 last year through November, down almost 25% from pre-pandemic levels, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
- The number of film shoot days last year was the second-lowest observed by FilmLA, as the region struggled to rebound from strikes, outsourcing and technological change.
As if Hollywood didn’t have enough trouble getting back on its feet, the Los Angeles wildfires suspended filming, destroyed homes of stars and crews alike and even threatened the landmark Hollywood sign that towers over the city.
The devastation hit as local film and TV industry workers were already struggling to adjust to vast technological, financial and global changes that have severely reduced local production activity and eliminated thousands of jobs that may never come back.
New data examined by The Times shows that a number of jobs in L.A.’s film and TV business has barely budged since the strike by actors and writers ended in fall 2023.
And with slower-than-hoped for recovery from the strikes, combined with continuing runaway production and industry contraction, on-location filming in the L.A. region fell 5.6% last year from 2023, FilmLA said Wednesday. The number of film shoot days last year totaled just 23,480, which was the second-lowest observed by FilmLA, which handles film permits for the region. The other was in 2020 when the COVID-19 outbreak disrupted production.
Already grappling with a production slowdown, Hollywood workers now face another hurdle with the fallout from the Southern California fires.
“As we await signs of continuing business growth in 2025, it is important we recognize that no aspect of life in Greater Los Angeles is unaffected by recent fire events and the heartbreaking loss of lives, homes, businesses and cherished community spaces,” FilmLA President Paul Audley said in a statement. “Many who participate in the region’s entertainment economy are directly affected by this tragedy.”
Motion picture industry payrolls averaged around 100,000 last year through November — the latest month available. That’s down almost 25% from pre-pandemic levels, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Creative entertainment occupations, such as writing and acting, are nearly 40% below 2022 levels, according to an analysis of census data by Westwood Economics & Planning Associates.
After strikes by actors and writers last year, Los Angeles’ entertainment economy is struggling to stage a comeback as production activity, employment and box office revenue are down.
Statistical breakdowns weren’t available for lighting technicians, prop masters and other production workers, but interviews and various reports suggest the employment picture is just as bad — if not worse — for so-called below-the line crews who work on film sets.
Westwood Economics, an economic policy and industry analysis firm in L.A., said job losses for noncollege graduates in Hollywood were slightly higher than for college graduates.
Separate statewide data for the film industry show both employment and the amount of work in recent months are about what they were in the early 1990s.
From September to November 2024, Californians employed in motion pictures and sound recording worked an average 31.5 hours a week, whereas they routinely put in 35 hours or more in pre-pandemic years, BLS data shows.
Among other things, having too few hours of work can mean loss of health insurance.
Unemployment overall in California’s motion pictures industry — which is concentrated around the Los Angeles region — was hovering around 20% last fall, according to Westwood Economics. And that’s probably understating the severity of the downturn given that thousands have dropped out of the Hollywood labor force or left the state.
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The wildfires will add to the challenges. While Hollywood’s stars and directors who lost their coastal homes may have personal resources or second properties to decamp to, thousands of more-modest industry workers live in Pasadena, Altadena, Glendale and other areas where homes were burnt or under evacuation orders.
Although major production centers and sound stages escaped largely unscathed, work on a number of TV shows and feature films was suspended last week, in part because of poor air quality and hazardous weather conditions.
There are questions about the availability of resources like water, as well as public services such as firefighters and police, which are needed to support filming but have been extremely taxed due to the fires. Studio executives say it may be awhile before people are ready to talk about new projects; some pitch meetings previously scheduled have been put on hold.
Economists worry that the effects of the historic natural disaster could be long lasting.
“Will there be any noticeable delays and will it get more people to leave?” asked Stephen Levy, director of the Center for Continuing Study of the California Economy.
California has a film and TV production problem. Industry professionals and experts are trying to determine what can be done to fix it.
Even before the fires, there wasn’t a lot of work to go around.
“If you look at the employment numbers, they’re massively down prior to the strikes, and they aren’t showing a ton of signs of recovering,” said Kevin Klowden, a Milken Institute economist who studies the Hollywood economy. “You need an ecosystem with a certain number of productions going on locally.”
Although on-location filming picked up a bit in the fourth quarter, production for all of last year was down more than 35% from 2019 before the pandemic, streaming wars and labor strikes distorted activity, according to FilmLA.
“I can see the shrinkage, the crews getting smaller,” said Roger Oda, 45, an animation art director in Los Angeles whose credits include “X-Men ’97.”
Between Oda and his wife, a director in animation, they’re seeing shows shelved or canceled, such as Paramount’s “Star Trek: Lower Decks,” for financial reasons.
Other projects are getting cut into shorter seasons, or getting done at cheaper locales.
“It’s basically not knowing where the next job is going to come from,” said Oda, who’s on the executive board of the Animation Guild in L.A. that ratified a new labor contract last month.
Studio executives are reluctant to green-light projects because they don’t know where the industry is going. Even as box office sales ended last year on a hopeful note, theater attendance remains substantially below earlier years, and cable TV is rapidly losing audiences to streaming and other direct-to-digital content providers.
Legacy media companies have lost billions of dollars on streaming services over the years, with Disney’s direct-to-consumer business only turning profitable last year.
So companies are doing what they can to slash costs and limit losses. Comcast is planning to spin off most of its basic cable channels. Warner Bros. Discovery said it will restructure. Paramount Global has laid off thousands ahead of its merger with Skydance Media.
“There’s a period of asset readjustment coming,” Tony Vinciquerra, the just-departed chief executive of Sony Pictures, said in a recent interview with The Times. He remained confident that things would turn up for the industry, but not before 2026, and until then, he said, it’ll be a “little bit chaotic.”
While L.A. remains a dominant production center, there has been a continuing flight of film jobs to countries such as Britain and Canada — as well as newer locations including Spain and the Czech Republic — that have lower costs, stronger incentives and cheaper currencies.
Production levels in the Greater Los Angeles area in the third quarter of 2024 were 5% lower than they were during the strikes, according to FilmLA.
In the U.S., smaller states have continued to chip away at California’s dominance in entertainment, including Georgia and New Mexico, where Netflix has made major investments.
California’s share of all motion pictures employment in the country is now down to 27% — from a high of 46% in the 1990s, according to BLS data.
That continuing decline has created what Gov. Gavin Newsom recently called a crisis in the industry. He’s proposed more than doubling California’s tax credit for film production to $750 million. If passed, the measure would take effect in July and surpass other capped film and TV tax credit programs in the country.
Bigger tax breaks would almost certainly lure some production back. After a recent allocation of $20 million, the Apple TV+ show, “Bad Monkey,” said it was moving from Florida to California.
But even tax incentives will only help so much, analysts say. Some productions aren’t eligible, including reality TV programs, which have nosedived in recent quarters, FilmLA’s data show. Nor do the tax credits cover wages for producers, directors and actors.
California “has resisted [boosting] tax credits for years out of a combination of complacency and the wrongheaded idea that a credit would mostly benefit wealthy stars,” said Jody Simon, a longtime entertainment lawyer at Fox Rothschild in Los Angeles.
Simon and others say the film industry should get a lift this year from sports and other live action and animation, plus new installments of “Avatar,” “Mission: Impossible” and “Superman,” among others, coming to the big screen.
There are some other bright spots. The shift to streaming is increasing the demand for dubbing international shows, for example.
Netflix has partnered with SAG-AFTRA to host a training program for dubbing, which has helped voice actors like Mike McNerney.
“It feels like it’s kind of steady right now,” said McNerney, who’s worked on “Briganti,” (“Brigands: The Quest for Gold”) an Italian historical drama series that came out on Netflix last year.
“I can’t really say what the future holds,” said McNerney, who divides his time between Los Angeles and Chicago. “But ... as long as foreign films are coming in and companies that appreciate the quality of a SAG actor continue to support us and like the work that we do, then I think we’ve got a chance.”
Although AI is viewed as a job threat, the technology doesn’t yet seem to be good enough to fully replace voice actors in the dubbing space, McNerney says.
And a lot of other AI work, whether in animation design or story writing and editing, still needs people who can make the necessary prompts and oversee the quality of machine-generated content.
What’s more, the rise in virtual production has also created some new job opportunities for cinematographers, lighting technicians and environmental artists, as well as those who know how to run LED systems that can be used to create fantastical worlds.
“A big part of virtual production is the capability to take filmmakers where they couldn’t go before,” said Alyssa Fritz, a producer who works part-time at USC’s cinematic arts school’s networking program. “We can go to the North Pole now. We can build that, and it’s great.”
Fritz said Disney hired several virtual production alumni to work on the films “Mufasa: The Lion King” and “Snow White.”
Still, the totality of these emerging jobs is still small compared with the thousands that have vanished in a historical industry shakeup.
“This is the longest down stretch that we’re seeing, certainly in memory,” said Klowden of the Milken Institute. “The question is, how does it come back from that?”
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