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Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

I was actually shocked by this tariff. It's a pro-union, pro-labor, classic progressive move.

If you haven't been following what's happening with film production, basically production has moved from LA, Atlanta, New York, etc. to cheap countries in Eastern Europe and Asia.

A vast majority of IATSE film crew productions have now vacated the US. It's decimated the local film crew workforce and forced many to leave the industry entirely.

I wrote more about it here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43893915

The film crew folks post a lot about it on Reddit, especially in the /r/film industry(city) subreddits:

https://www.reddit.com/r/FilmIndustryLA/comments/1k39cod/the...

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You're assuming anything in this was planned, designed, premeditated.

It wasn't.

He's going to flip-flop on this 15 times in the next three months while studios (and other industries) go into hibernation waiting until something (or anything) stabilizes.

Pro-union right until the point where the studios go whining to him about exactly that.

Can you actually provide numbers? like how many of the movies that used or should have been shot in the US were off-shored abroad? A bit of a "cheap" research but deepseek did search the top 10 grossing movies of 2025; and all of them except one were shot in the US.

Look at 2024; mostly animated or shot out of the U.S. And if you look at the trends the number of jobs have been declining since 2019: https://www.zippia.com/key-grip-jobs/trends/

Imagine the costs of any blockbuster if it’s made in the US only

They used to do all principal photography for half of all Marvel films in Atlanta. The industry has almost completely pulled out in just the past three years.

We had a booming, absolutely thriving industry for nearly two decades. People moved from LA to be here. We built hundreds of studios and sound stages. Now they're sitting empty.

Everyone is going to Serbia now. IATSE folks are having to leave the industry entirely.

you can see everyone willfully ignoring this here, which makes me nervous about actually solving this problem long term. I used to dream of screenwriting and that dream is almost certainly dead but I'd like to see others have a chance. It looks bleak now

Why would you be surprised? Are you expecting some sort of pro-labor movement in a startup focused tech forum?

Modern tech is all about disruption. You get paid way too much because you’re squeezing costs (ie labor) out of business operations.

There was an action movie that filmed car chases in my city about 15 years ago. A bunch of the crew was at a bar I hung out with and we were trading stories. There was a dude who was making alot of money to essentially wet down the streets from a fire hydrant. There’s reasons for that — hydrants require some training to safely operate.

But end of the day, the money guys at Netflix, Amazon or whatever would rather just pay some rando a few bucks and let insurance deal with the damage. Or build a fake street in Serbia.

my view of capitalism is that you can't remove the market. it will exist with or without you, so if you have some control you should incentivize the things that are better for everyone.

To me I think it's possible for Netflix and Amazon and whoever to exist and make a lot of money, but also not have nation-state level power. The latter is something we haven't decided we want yet, but I think we'll come around. If there were even just very small controls (that worked) on the size of a company, or how many industries it can go into, then things would look differently. But when we let so few companies consolidate so much power through money, the status quo is a pretty natural outcome. Imagine a world where there were regional amazon.com's, because we just decided at some point they got too big. Same for google. We'd have actual competition. Tech enables market consolidation in ways we didn't expect and we have to do some actual work to fix it.

I love this comment. Please do not delete it. I'm saving this.

I wholeheartedly agree with you.

I agree with you, and this happened in the past. The entire system is designed to prevent this, and this newfound love of isolationism is a way to cement it in.

Let’s be real, these giant tech companies are becoming big stagnant bureaucracies. They can’t adapt anymore and want to build a moat to let them lumber along for a few decades.

The core assumption of the policy makers and business people was the idea that the Chinese are a bunch of dumb peasants working for scraps and unable to produce. They seem to be holding their own with AI, cars, trains, aircraft, etc. They may have a credible competitor for the B737/A320 — that’s a pretty big leap.

Pro labor for whom?

The move was presumably done by americans themselves, no? It's a choice.

If american producers wanted to produce in america, they always could. They never had to move. It would just be more expensive. It will still be more expensive even after tariffs. Tariffs don't make labor cheaper. Cheaper choice will just not exist for americans.

Seems like other countries have cheaper workforce.

Seems you were a-okay with people in California losing their jobs so you got them in Atlanta. You seem not okay with it moving from Atlanta to elsewhere.

And stop repeating the Serbia line in every comment. You've done it multiple times. What productions are in Serbia? How many out of how many?

Did you lose your job to one in Serbia and now it's sour grapes all along?

The Serbia angle is weird considering that so may movies were shot and are being shot in Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania...

In general, all of Europe is bursting at the seams with movie and TV productions, many of them American: https://issuu.com/thelatesteditionishereandfreetoview/docs/c...

> Everyone is going to Serbia now.

Here's a quote for you:

--- start quote ---

“Labour unions contend that between 35 and 50 percent of feature films turned out by American producers are made abroad,” the New York Times reported on October 4 1959 as the volume of what were then called “runaway productions” began to soar.

--- end quote ---

Notice the year.

Hollywood has been running away from California for over 70 years. Your obsession with Serbia completely ignores that all of Europe is used for movie and TV productions, and Serbia is just the latest addition: https://issuu.com/thelatesteditionishereandfreetoview/docs/c...

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