How Hollywood stopped making movies in Hollywood
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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.
The failure of Camelot (1967) caused American filmmakers to shift exterior shots from studio backlots to authentic locations.[4] The film was widely criticized for its cheap look because it was obviously filmed on an architecturally ambiguous set against the chaparral-covered hills of Burbank.[4]Considering how much they did there it wasn't nearly as inconvenient as you would think. The school had a good process in place for controlling the chaos. It's still weird watching the movie and seeing my old library in it.
Stargate Universe once, Atlantis twice, and SG-1 six times!
On the flip side, they use a lot of local place names and things, so it’s like a little in-joke when you notice them.
Also Toronto / southern Ontario.
If you see a city scene and there's streetcar tracks, it was probably shot in Toronto. See opening shot of this scene in Reacher s02e04:
1. City/region becomes a boom-town based on a new high profit-margin industry
2. As that region becomes more wealthy, labor increases in price, thus there is more incentive to seek labor/resources for that industry outside the city/region
3. City/region hollows out of middle-class level jobs for the industry, retains ceremonial labor and executive offices.
once people are arranging plane tickets/charters, then they fly to the best place financially.
But LA/Hollywood.gov priced themselves out of the market first.
It's all about the tax incentives.
Georgia started the race by offering very generous (at the time) tax credits to pull production away from LA and NYC. It worked for a while, and Disney filmed most of its blockbusters there for 15 years. But the talent was unwilling to move to Atlanta, so the actual cost savings weren't that great. This meant Georgia had a U-shaped movie distribution: very low-budget straight-to-streaming-back-catalog crap using entirely local cast and crew, or really big budget movies. Very few middle-tier movies shot in Georgia.
Then London decided to get in on the act, and offered a ridiculously generous film tax incentive that applies to almost all film costs, not just the "below the line" costs (those related to actual production expenses, like crew, equipment, etc). The only catch was that the studio had to publicly disclose the movie's budget, but the incentive was so generous that studios were willing to play along. LA survived the initial blow, until the dual writer and actor strikes drew attention to the UK's non-existent labor protections, but Georgia was destroyed by London's incentive because its tax incentive was the only reason for Hollywood to film there (and filming in Georgia is down over 80% from its peak).
So then California decided to make its film incentive competitive again, nearly matching London's film incentive. But the geniuses in the state legislature wanted to spread the love, so the most competitive credit is only available outside of LA. Epic Fail #1. Worse, there's a fixed and relatively low annual cap for the film tax incentive, so only a handful of productions qualify each year. Epic fail #2. As a result, productions that don't qualify for the CA film tax credit generally go to London (for the incentive) or Vancouver (because everything is cheaper there even without incentives).
P.S. I was part of the downturn-related layoffs, so I no longer work in film or anything film-adjacent anymore.
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.
I suspect there is a myth among most people that executives -- especially Hollywood ones -- didn't get to that position by being smarter or harder working than others, or in doing so did not pass those qualities onto their children. Perhaps there is truth there, but I have yet to see it with my own eyes.
They were there make a good impression and build connections
You referred to them an entitled but clearly they were not entitled to any financial compensation so who is really entitled here the workers or Hollywood expecting free Labour ?
Everyone involved still pays their taxes, but the special purpose vehicle used to organize the production is essentially a passthrough entity.
Each movie is set up as a separate legal business entity (LLC). That's the SPV (special purpose vehicle). https://www.google.com/search?q=each+hollywood+movie+is+a+se...
There's also a separate LLC for the parent production company. The production company LLC can also send invoices to the individual movie LLC for services. People can get creative with production companies "overcharging" for various expenses back to the movie's LLC but whatever creative accounting they want to do still needs to ultimately satisfy IRS scrutiny if there's an audit. There are entertainment attorneys that specialize in movie LLCs.
The relevant taxing authorities would be concerned with the parent companies' financials, not the subsidiaries. Moving money from right hand to left hand doesn't change one's tax liabilities.
"Hollywood accounting" only refers to civil disputes due to insufficiently defined contracts between two businesses (usually actors and producers).
Well, yes, but avoiding taxes is not the point of "Hollywood Accounting", rather avoiding paying actors.
The IRS can collect taxes from whichever business entity makes a profit, but, critically, actors cannot. They signed a deal with one entity, and are only payed a share of net profits if that one particular entity makes a profit.
Hollywood Accounting, then, is the process of shifting costs around so that the legal entity responsible for paying the actors never makes a profit.
The SPVs never own anything and never have any expertise in anything. So they have to pay the parent company for a wide range of services, from advertising and marketing to distribution to prop and equipment rental. That makes it easy to shift costs into the SPV as necessary.
I wasn't saying avoiding taxes was the purpose. Instead, I'm saying whatever "bogus" or "inflated" expenses that the production company LLC is charging to the movie LLC still has to be somewhat plausible. A simplistic example of what they can't do:
- Tom Cruise TC Productions LLC sends an invoice to MissionImpossible8 movie LLC with a single line item that says "script advisory service for $1 billion dollars" which then conveniently causes the movie's balance sheet to be negative $1 billion dollars and thus never make a profit.
The point is the production LLC, the distributor entities, etc all charging the movie LLC so that it shows zero profits ... still need to play their financial accounting games with more sophistication than that. Yes, go ahead and fabricate various costs to avoid paying actors on "net profit points" but it still needs a veneer of plausibility. Otherwise, the IRS comeback will be, "Is the $1 billion fee the real market rate for script advisory services? Do you have evidence of that amount ever being paid? etc etc"
If that's not creative accounting, I don't know what is.
That doesn't sound right. Traditionally, and in particular in the case of Forrest Gump, the distinction is between people who contract for a percentage of net profit (always zero) and people who contract for a percentage of gross revenue. The revenue is measured at the same point either way; it's just about whether you got suckered or not.
The point of Hollywood accounting is to intentionally create enough inflated expenses (billed from companies controlled by the studios or related parties of the producers etc.) to ensure that the net profit is zero or less, even when the film actually generated a lot of income.
It's true that tax gets paid eventually (and somewhere, maybe a tax haven) but it is intentionally creative accounting designed to minimise tax and screw people out of their royalties.
It reminds me of the eBay market in bulk lots of used scratch-offs harvested from the trash:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/robertwood/2016/01/14/powerball...
Affordable housing tax credits are contingent on a tremendous amount of regulations and stipulations, including who ends up holding equity in the property (it's not easy to use these as passthrough vehicles to get personally rich), so the private lenders tend to be repeat players, often banks, who understand how to navigate the process. Among other things, I guess it's a way to outsource oversight, so that the government doesn't need to maintain a huge bureaucracy to police each and every development project. OTOH, the financing complexity comes at a cost; a significant fraction of the value of the tax credits pays for lawyers and accountants, rather than to actual construction.
I don't know if filmmaking subsidies are more lax or easier to game.
Also, I think using tax credit schemes, instead of direct payments, might be a way to obfuscate the cost of these programs from a legislative and political perspective; not unlike the Earned Income tax credit. Nominally speaking, tax credits reduce government revenues rather contribute to expenditures; the latter draws far more attention.
Clark Hunt is the largest recipient of welfare in the entire region.
The reasoning was pretty simple: the Hunt family is worth $25 billion [0]. They could likely pay for any sort of improvements to Arrowhead, or to replace it altogether, without taxpayer funds, which comes from people in a metro area where the average income is on the lower side of things in a time when costs for everything keep going up.
On the other side of the state line, Kansas lawmakers specifically targeted the goal of moving two professional sports teams to the state using public funds called STAR bonds.
The end result is that the Kansas City metropolitan area will be spending, in total, about $3-4 billion to give the Hunt family a new place for their sports team to play, likely far away from the city center, and that Arrowhead needs to be torn down, which will cost at least tens of millions of dollars, once again, at taxpayer expense.
$3 billion could probably build out a real public transit system for the KC metro.
[0] https://sports.yahoo.com/meet-25-billion-hunt-family-2024104...
But hey sometimes people vote for their teams to stay despite the negative monetary ROI.
> The Minneapolis Lakers moved to Los Angeles, where there are no lakes; the [Houston] Oilers moved to Tennessee, where there is no oil. The [New Orleans] Jazz moved to Salt Lake City, where they don't allow music.
Other names like that are
- the Baltimore Colts (named for Maryland's thoroughbred racing tradition) moving to Indianapolis (more known for open wheel auto racing),
- the Vancouver Grizzlies moving to Memphis, Tennessee (which never had Grizzlies even in the post-glacial period)
- the Brooklyn (Streetcar) Dodgers moving to Los Angeles in 1958 right when the LAMTA took over the few remaining street car lines before replacing them with buses in 1963.
The closest thing I can think of in European sports, and it's a stretch, is cycling teams. I picked this teams as the first example I could think of, not because it's some egregious example:
1984–1986 Kwantum–Decosol
1987–1989 Superconfex–Yoko
1990–1992 Buckler–Colnago
1993–1994 WordPerfect
1995 Novell
1996–2012 Rabobank
2013 Blanco
2013–2014 Belkin
2015–2018 LottoNL–Jumbo
2019–2023 Jumbo–Visma
2024– Visma–Lease a Bike
via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visma%E2%80%93Lease_a_Bike_(me.... Also note that the team was newly formed from a schism in TI–Raleigh, where the other half of the riders went to Panasonic.
The parallel is that the name changes make tracking that team a real ship of Theseus problem: if the name, sponsors, riders, and staff turn over, is it worth calling it the same team? Similarly, if a football team changes cities, names, personnel, and owners, is it worth calling it the same team (Houston Oilers, Tennessee Oilers, Tennessee Titans)?
It was radioactively controversial at the time, most fans never made the switch.
Eventually Wimbledon fans created a new club AFC Wimbledon who have since got promoted all the way to League One (the same league as MK Dons).
So the MK Dons owners ended up with nothing for all the trouble and they may as well have just made a new team. Nobody else has been stupid enough to try it since
Since then Canada and the UK in particular (and NZ and Australia) have had various different fluctuations in subsidies for various parts of filming / doing post-production of movies over the intervening years.
We had a boom from 2010-2022, but post streaming era the gravity has moved to the UK and Eastern Europe.
Post-production is very much still in California though.
Atlanta did a lot of the big ones.
Out of the many reasons, one is quite simple: daylight. This used to be really important with film.
Historically, this was why efforts to move filming to somewhere like 'Scunthorpe, UK' didn't really work, despite tax fiddles, because you need light and some places just don't have it.
But this doesn't matter now, because film has moved on, there is no need to have a massive glowing unshielded nuclear fusion reactor, 93 million miles directly overhead, just to get some lens focused on some bits of silver halide.
Edison had a lot of early patents for film, and wanted to monopolize the industry.
Film makers in California were far enough away that it was inconvenient for Edison to sue them, both because it required sending people there in person, and because the district courts were favorable.
https://www.zillow.com/home-values/11267/edison-nj/ https://www.zillow.com/home-values/12447/los-angeles-ca/
Might be opposite sides of the country but CA and NJ are lock step when it comes to making it unaffordable for younger generations to buy homes.
Because Edison and Patents in New York which was the original centre for filmmaking in America.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_Picture_Patents_Company...
Movies and shows like Inception, Interstellar, Ex Machina, Tenet, Dune 1&2, Odyssey, Chernobyl, Foundation, and The Last of Us were VFXed in large part by Indian companies like Prime Focus, Makuta, Phanton, and their subsidiaries.
A number of these overlap with HPC and Distributed Systems with a number of major players in the space coming out of the GPU design space like Raja Koduri (AMD, Apple, Intel). Nvidia, AMD, Intel, Apple, and others having dedicated GPU design teams in India since the early 2000s also helped.
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.
If every movie defaulted to CGI over natural settings, you wouldn't have stuff like the Odyssey made...which is setting sales records.
If they don't want to make a movie properly, why make it at all? The corner cutting across the board has become so bad that these movies are unwatchable.
This isn't even a new problem. A lot of traditional CGI can still be bad enough to ruin the illusion when it's the state of the art and a lot of attention to detail went into it. We've been circling the drain for decades. I suspect this is why everything became superheroes for a while. The illusion doesn't have to be good to meet that low of a bar.
If the goal is to be as cheap as possible, you might as well release the story as a picture book written by AI.
Also, it's not exactly that the higher effort, better quality stuff is gone as it's been drowned out by the slop. Higher quality things are still being made(e.g. The Odyssey which uses minimal CGI), just much smaller as a percentage of overall.
Earlier unit economics of slop were roughly comparable to higher effort output. It was cheaper, but not dramatically so to push out crap code, so the volume of slop was a bit lower. Now, low effort slop is genuinely low effort due to AI, so the economics work out even accounting for the lower adoption and higher complaints from the users.
Time will tell if this is a temporary phase, or the new, bleak normal.
We've had low effort fraud for all of human history. We absolutely need to revise our definition of fraud to include AI slop. People need to wake the fuck up.
Nobody would accept a low quality product under any other circumstances, so why is AI different? We only have this large scale fascination with it because so many people are completely uneducated in computer science and have no clue how it works or what the limitations are.
Hollywood moves have little to do with art or even entrainment for that matter. They are simply revenue generating machines. Rich people invest in a movie production and expect a return. Hollywood moves don't take artistic risks anymore which is why franchises have become such a big thing. If it make money before, it will probably make money again. Even if it's bad, fans of the last movie will buy a ticket just to see. If it's bad, well, you have their money already!
It's pretty similar to Silicon valley these days. The technology is just a vehicle to produce a return on VC money.
Remember that a lot of the people driving opinions on stuff are the artists that would be displaced by this technology.
Also... Actors aren't hired based on acting skill. AI can't replace the notoriety part of why studios hire actors.
Actors will still be in demand, at least leads and most speaking roles. 3000 extras, that’s going to be AI.
My hope would be this allows for hyper small budget shows to rival what takes millions today. Maybe we can actually get some creative stories instead of Marvel slop fest 43
No way. Small creatives will go elsewhere. Unless the structural "winner takes all" economy changes, small players will have no chance, especially when they have to use monopoly expensive tech.
Good writing already left hollywood, hollywood is already repetitive reboot factory.
I mean it probably can if a few famous actors license their likeness to be used in AI films. And it's probably only a matter of time until fully AI actors get marketed and licensed for use in AI films. I don't see a fundamental reason why AI actors couldn't build the same kind of notoriety and following.
Can AI's trash a room at Hotel Marmont? Dump their girlfriends when said girlfriends turn 25? Become Scientologists?
Some of us remember the story of the Luddites and hope that this time might be different with 200 years of social progress.
That's a cost problem, not a technology problem.[1]
Also, how old is your cute youtube video? Isn't the fact that 99% of restaurants are still some dudes working on stoves and friers all these decades later proof that the technology isn't there (and can you prove it's price and not something else limiting uptake? Aside point, if I said "we can't go to Mars anytime soon" would a video of the moon landing disprove my statement in your mind/elicit "that's a cost not a technology problem"?)
Furthermore, if we're trying to extrapolate my statement out far enough to make it bad, wouldn't like Swanson's TV dinners be enough to show that I'm "wrong" that the food industry is largely automated/human free production? It sorta falls apart when we talk about food SERVICE which is the specific industry I was talking about (and which will never be killed by AI, because it's based in community and culture, things that you can't get a clanker to do).
>nobody actually cares about what they buy, which is why they will suck down all this slop
McDonald's exists?
I worked in James Beard nominated restaurants and have eaten at 3 star restaurants, I have no qualms with fast food as food that couldn't be expanded to most of the industry.
It's a bit like people who complain that everything on the news is always bad. Everyone hates it, yet it's what everyone consumes.
> YouTube starts shoving AI generated shorts into my feed every time I login
> Accidentally click every once in a while or out of perverse curiosity
I can't tell you whether this will be sustained in the future, but it's disingenuous to claim it doesn't happen.
The data disagrees.
https://news.adobe.com/news/2026/06/creators-toolkit-report-...
https://manuscriptreport.com/data/ai-publishing-statistics
This.
The reason Tom Holland and Matt Damon are in a Greek myth film is because they put bums in seats and give Nolan extra money to work with.
And AI lookalikes arent a guaranteed success either. Robert Bronzi hasn't been able to revive interest in Charles Bronson.
I find myself mostly watching small creators on YouTube these days and only pay to watch a film if it's unusually good... But I never want to pay a cent to consume the output of some statistical model.
1. Stagecraft/virtual production is a thing, yes, but the backgrounds are not "AI rendered," they're 3D scenes built in Unreal. They have to be, because they need to dynamically react to the camera moving to create parallax.
2. Yes, some people are using AI to plan scenes. With respect to your relative, those people are not the ones getting hired on large projects. When someone is hired in the film industry, they're hired for their specific taste, creative eye, and opinions. That contribution is literally their whole job. Outsourcing that task to AI is, within the industry, seen as an indication that someone is inexperienced or simply bad at their job. Crews don't want to work for those people, and audiences don't want to watch content created that way.
3. It's easy to "expect" that "one day" AI might become the way movies are captured if you don't actually understand the limitations of AI video generation versus the demands of filmmakers and the expectations of audiences. Putting aside the obvious stuff like continuity, shot duration, and resolution...GenAI is not color managed, it's not physically accurate, the results can't be copyrighted and it struggles with anything not in its training data (I.E., genuinely new ideas.)
This is NOT to say that this technology has no future in the film industry, obviously it does. But half the movies at the Oscars last year were shot on film, so the notion that all filmmaking is just going to turn into pixel soup being generated from prompts is just hilarious to everyone actually within the industry.
The trend is that increasingly, the entertainment people consume comes from small-time creators. And these small creators have thus far had very little capacity to create truly visually appealing content and take on more ambitious works. And still, they've been taking mindshare from the movie industry.
Increasingly sophisticated experiences are becoming possible for these creators via AI tools. Where do you think this is going? Keep on laughing it up at your award ceremonies, but the audience is moving on.
If they fully embrace AI and turn tha already existing slop production to hypersonic speed, the audiences will even be less interested. At least the audiences in my bubble.
Visual sophistication is not the top reason to visit movies since CGI got so good. In the 2000s nice SFX was also a key reason t visit a theater. Nowadays the less SFX the more likely I will like a film. AI is just SFX.
And when we see the edges of that control, people will be interested in seeing things that make it "the old way," part of the reason you see a lot more practical effects these days, and I would include the background-in-unreal backdrops there, because they read as more real than actors in front of a green screen—for reasons that are totally unconscious unless you are highly trained in the differences.
While I do think gen AI is going to change how movies and TV shows get made, anyone telling you it will be a whole hog replacement has not studied the history of multimedia and probably hasn't made anything that required a high-level of vision themselves.
The Odyssey was shot on IMAX cameras half the size of a car that weighed 400lbs. It's easy to call that out as being ridiculous, surely a much smaller camera system could have achieved 99% the same results, etc. but that totally misses the point. Nolan could have shot it on anything he wanted, and he chose the less convenient way, because that is his process. If he was forced to use a more reasonable camera, it would not have been a Christopher Nolan film.
Sure, I'm down with that mix of generation + animation + mocap workflow. But at some point, people will going to look around at all the equipment, the people in mocap suits, the thousands of hours of generation and the millions of dollars of compute, and just wonder...wouldn't it be easier to just film someone with a real camera?
Link please - saw nothing like that from a quick search
Someone else already replied to you politely explaining this from another angle, but for some reason you not to engage with him.
Irrelevant to whom? He's not irrelevant to me and many movie fans.
Also, you are lecturing someone who seems to actually work or has worked on the movie industry.
Your point most definitely does not remain. You're arguing with someone who knows his/her stuff. Your claim, which comes from no experience, directly contradicts what someone who works in the industry is telling you how it actually works!
Kinda. There are also interesting technical reasons. From my lay person understanding:
1. IMAX film is physically larger and creates a higher quality image
2. Because of the size and machine noise close up dialog is normally redubbed.
3. Nolan (and team?) came up with a method of sealing off the cameras' noise that made them even larger, so they had a system of mirrors that allowed the actors to interact in a more natural way and allowed close in capture by IMAX with integrated sound.
Like you mention James Cameron, and he is just one of hundreds of filmmakers who got their start with Roger Corman.
If the Roger Corman of tomorrow is budgeting 50 bucks + 1000000 AI tokens, you aren't going to get another James Cameron. The guy wont get a chance to make practical effects for a bunch of low budget practical films. We are already seeing this with CGI being so common.
>And when we see the edges of that control, people will be interested in seeing things that make it "the old way," part of the reason you see a lot more practical effects these days, and I would include the background-in-unreal backdrops there, because they read as more real than actors in front of a green screen—for reasons that are totally unconscious unless you are highly trained in the differences.
Yep, and we are already at the low end of people who can implement these techniques.
>has not studied the history of multimedia
Look at the animation quality of childrens media over the last 20 years. They have grabbed low quality CGI with both hands.
> audiences don't want to watch content created that way.
I want to point out a couple things. Not that I'd assert that you're wrong in basically your whole post. But...
Filmed movies and normal television programs aren't competing only with other content coming from (so-called) 'Hollywood studios.' They're competing for audience attention with all content, and to be thorough with any other activity people might get up to. The potential damage to (so-called) Hollywood is equal in these two scenarios:
1. 50% of films and TV shows shift production to AI-first: They use no real shots, they just motion capture a few actors and use AI and Unreal sets built primarily with AI and put the whole thing together digitally.
2. Of the time per week that people today spend watching films and TV, people shift 50% of that time to watching cheap, often-AI-produced junk on TikTok. Or for that matter, it doesn't even need to be AI-produced junk - it could just be influencers screwing around / ranting / doing sponsored content / etc.
Either way we lost 50% of the jobs. As for whether audiences want to watch that content, I'm starting to be concerned that we (human consumers) have lost most of our control here. Most people today consume content in a few ways:
1. Algorithmic feeds show us content, one item at a time, decided by a platform owner (Meta, Google/YouTube).
2. Streaming services. Again, algorithmic. You have to scroll like 12 sections down to get to "Resume Watching" - past 11 other carousels of What Platform Owner Wants You To See
Distant third: Movie theaters, but people usually go specifically to see a certain film. What movies you even know about hinges on either a platform owner deciding to show you a video discussing a movie, or ad spend. And some people block ads, and most others try their best to skip them - this is a far cry from the 90s, when movie ads were a staple of every commercial break. I used to at least know of every film in an 8-screen theater at all times, able to give a brief synopsis of the premise, just based on the linear TV advertising I saw.
Anyway just a long-winded way to say, don't underestimate the power of platform owners to force-feed us AI garbage and artificially generate "demand" if they decide that it's in their interest to - and this is exactly their playbook due to the cost savings potential. Same reason Spotify started padding their first-party playlists with AI slop.
You're right that my relative probably isn't going to be at the top of the list to be hired for that work. He doesn't work in Hollywood level stuff and I also think that he knows he's going to have to fight to stay relevant and compete for the work that's available to him. Fortunately he's at the end of his career and his kids are adults. I think he can see the writing on the wall for his career either way.
Color management and maintaining context across multiple renders is actually the conversation we were talking about and the software that he is using has mechanisms to define context across a rendered shots and even across multiple projects. He just wasn't using them as it's an alien concept to him. My point is all of that is possible and solved and will become easier as the market matures.
I also have a friend who was significantly involved in Odyssey and I think the reason why so many films are made with film at the moment is because the industry is clinging on to what it believes is authentic when being pushed towards a commoditized race to the bottom.
As people stop paying to go to the cinema and Netflix demands tighter and tighter budgets for work, I think we will sadly see the end of this means of production because fewer and fewer people will want to pay for it.
The end goal of all of this is actually customized content where the film that I see and the film that you see is different because it's rendered to our tastes. There's a whole school of thought there around a collective experience versus an individual experience, but the technology will allow it if it's completely digitally created and one would assume that will be where it will go.
In other words, I might want Odyssey but framed as a horror filmed in noir and you might want Odyssey framed as a rom-com and the AI will just generate the version for us based on the original directors prompt. I actually think that's kind of sad, but that doesn't mean that isn't where things are going.
They are not. Source: I have run one of these LED volume studios for 4 years.
> Color management and maintaining context across multiple renders is actually the conversation we were talking about and the software that he is using has mechanisms to define context across a rendered shots and even across multiple projects. He just wasn't using them as it's an alien concept to him. My point is all of that is possible and solved and will become easier as the market matures.
These problems are solved...ACES, DRT, FDL, etc. exist, are open, and AI companies are welcome to utilize them. But for some reason, they don't (or can't.)
> I also have a friend who was significantly involved in Odyssey and I think the reason why so many films are made with film at the moment is because the industry is clinging on to what it believes is authentic when being pushed towards a commoditized race to the bottom.
The reason people are still shooting on film is because it forces you to slow down and think about every decision, because mistakes become very costly. The decision to shoot on film objectively does not make technical sense, and studios would much prefer people shoot on cheaper digital cameras. But filmmakers still use it because of the specific creative mindset it requires of you.
> The end goal of all of this is actually customized content where the film that I see and the film that you see is different because it's rendered to our tastes. There's a whole school of thought there around a collective experience versus an individual experience, but the technology will allow it if it's completely digitally created and one would assume that will be where it will go.
The end goal...for who? Totally fine if this is something you want and interests you, but unless you have a time machine, this is just speculation.
Remains to be seen. If you read the full thing from the copyright office they left a massive window open for anything with significant human involvement.
https://x.com/mattshumer_/status/2081100592689324502?s=20
https://x.com/karpathy/status/2083749667410727319
even without AI you can see the progression of procedural geneartion which shows one path (of many) the AI can take
Yes. Asian drama is already there.[1] The first AI-generated Asian vertical-format drama was released in November 2025. Now, about 400 new ones are released each day. The tools are online, and you can sign up for a few dollars a month.
Quality varies widely. The visuals are now quite good, but chatbots used to generate screenplays still have trouble holding the plot together. Much of this stuff looks like fan fiction authors are at the controls. When someone competent is driving, the results are quite good. Cost is about 10% of live action.
Hollywood probably has less than three years to live.
[1] https://pinedrama.com/blog/paradigm-shift-ai-short-drama-rev...
The article mentions ShortMax's "Too Late! The Daughter of Olympus Forsakes You" and NetShort's "One Move God Mode". I found something on YouTube for both, but there's zero chance what I saw was Hollywood level quality (unless you really hate Hollywood movies!)
The visuals are consistently good now. If you put in a decent script, there's a good chance of getting something good. The script has to tell the characters what to emote. The automation isn't good at that yet. Nor are the vocals good at all.
Give it six months.
Any idea of the production cost?
Was it originally released as episodes?
I'm currently reading David Copperfield which was serialized as 20 monthly installments - which had side-effects.
"Probably" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.
If something is not being done using AI now, it's because the results are poor, not because of some sort of reluctance to embrace it.
AI may replace classic CGI
Thanks for the laugh.
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.
The distraction is that a lot of people think that they are property owners who are not. The bank owns your property, you're a tax farmer. The people who own the bank are your bosses. They are granted the right by the state to loan you the money to buy an overvalued property, without actually having the money to loan you, and on the condition that the property that you bought is theirs if you miss a repayment on the money that they loaned you that that they didn't have.
This is also why building more housing does not work in the long term to lower rents. We have a surplus of housing, just like we have a surplus of commercial property. But we have arbitrarily changed expectations for the margins of finance capital. The tax farmers (most landlords) are a distraction so that their tiny margins can be pointed at - because the money was made from the property when they purchased it. Now they're behind the 8-ball trying to make the payments, until they lose their job to a better tax farmer.
If you build 9000 shitty units at the site of a grocery store, you can raise all of the rents around them because the 9000 shitty units are now an escape valve against displacement and dislocation. The next step is to raise the rents on the 9000 shitty units, by any means necessary, even if it means keeping half of them empty for a decade, and using them to write off your taxes on other properties you own.
The fact that there's no grocery store and no parking for 9000 units? Your problem.
YIMBY activism is entirely financed by these people, which is why it's so loud.
People also feel secure if they have wealth, even if its assets that are illiquid. If you sell your house you have to buy another or pay rent.
Well, it became normal because there were people (sometimes, but not always, the same people with significant holdings in the software companies) who held a lot of real estate and knew if they wanted that real estate to be more valuable, they'd need to force people to use it, meaning show up to work every day.
SV is the failure it is today because it concentrated all of the talent in one place needlessly. Something the rest of the country explicitly worked to not see happen.
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.
Oh looking forward to some stats or estimates or some economic data then. Because it's well documented and known that California doesn't meet housing build targets unlike many cities in Texas which also have high immigration and yet have declining rents and home prices
> Next to me is a 6 unit building, all 2 bdrm units. Everyone is a recent immigrant from either Guatemala or Mexico
Oh okay anecdotes. Surely the actual hard evidence is coming later...
Okay, no evidence or economic stats or even theories at all. Wild. Zero grappling with why housing goes up in cost here vs down in other metro areas with similar high rates of immigration
> I work for Google and make relatively great money.
My God. You can work at Google and have your economic understanding of the world around you just be "I see a lot of immigrants. That must be the issue"
Classic supply/demand.
It also utilizes the space extremely inefficiently. Single level single family houses everywhere and the rest is parking space. The few parks are difficult to access by kids arriving by foot/bike.
This is what results in the high rent: Can't grow supply and don't use existing land efficiently.
Density: LA = 8,210/sq mi, Lisbon = 17,040/sq mi, Paris = 10,100/sq mi, Amsterdam = 13,670/sq mi, Copenhagen = 19,195/sq mi. (from wikipedia)
Look at Google Street maps: LA is a hellscape of concrete and asfalt. Lisbon and Amsterdam are much nicer and greener and they stil have higer density.
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.
I have no idea how strong the unions related to film are in the UK. It varies a lot between industries.
I’ve been in Los Angeles for over a decade, and I disagree with the premise that Hollywood has some overarching plan to shape how we think— more people watch TikToks than movies and network TV. I view Hollywood, and the creators/writers/producers of films themselves, moreso holding up a mirror reflecting the current circumstances we’re in rather than manufacturing it out of nowhere.
It really killed filmmaking, I’ve only seen ~5 movies released since 2016: Parasite, Backrooms, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Get Out, Don’t Look Up. I watch plenty of movies, there are more great movies from the 1940s to 2010s than I’ll ever have time to watch. I hope interesting movies start being made again.
Hollywood also went into sequel overdrive and released very few original properties and milked X-men, Harry Potter, Star Wars, etc. That didn’t help.
So like I think your experience is valid, and you're definitely noticing a real thing but I think it's better explained by you having more media literacy for contemporary topics and so you see the mirror being held up by these works way more obviously. Like I think about post 9/11 beginning of the Iraq war films and they're not even a little bit subtle.
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.
Crazy world.
Love the dig at the end.
[0] _ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_The_Incredibles_charac...
Cameras and equipment was expensive and not terribly mobile. Having a few studios and lots with the cameras and lights and rigs and so on gave you a huge advantage. From that a lot of the industry moved to an area, so it also had the network effect. People start getting lazy and want to commute to their latest project, so the whole #FilmInLA is compelling.
That's disappearing. Rapidly. The idea that one place is where movies are made is comically obsolete.
Talent is around the globe. Handheld cameras provide extraordinary quality and can work off the lighting of a candle.
And honestly, Los Angeles is a stunningly boring city. And if the movie is invariably some navel gazing about it by its residents (always, always featuring long shots of people on highways or driving around, because every LA film has to jerkoff about driving), why should a film be filmed there? I'd infinitely prefer London, Paris, Toronto, Miami, Vancouver, Berlin, NYC, Chicago, rural areas, Rome, and so on.
The world would be a better place if this sort of backwards, historic centralization was obliterated.
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 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.
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!
And it is also actually ok to do entertainment for older people, including boomers. People act as if there was something shameful about over 40 existing and have entertainment for them. It is as ok as enrertainment for young.
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.
kind of glossing over something pretty major
There's some stuff you can still do in LA but a huge amount of actual shoot days are in countries with lower costs and fewer labor restrictions.
> the entertainment industry's economics are brutal
A large part of those economics are self-inflicted. The money is "loaned" to the production company at credit card rates with repayment from the receipts from theater viewing years later. Depending on how "big" the movie is, 95-100% of the box office receipts for the first 2 weeks of a theater run go back to the studio (so the movie theater survives on selling popcorn and stuff). This tapers down until the theaters get 100% of ticket sales about 2 months later. The last movie that theaters made profits from displaying was The Full Monty - it got a small release in 1997 but those theaters played the movie for months.
I worked with some guys who did special effects for movies & TV shows.
Apparently some of those profits now go to the studio too? Some of the deals being made sound borderline criminal to me.
Besides millionaires from Santa Monica and homeless from downtown.
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...
With the correct writer, that could be a cool indie movie, right there.
Then he drives across a one-way bridge, and tracking shot above the car captures the big arrow New Zealand paints on the exit lane indicating you should drive in the *left* lane (started doing this after few too many tired tourists from RHD countries reverted to habit upon leaving a one-way bridge causing a head-on collision further down the road). They could've edited the arrow out, surely.
TL;DR thought Canada in a movie looked like New Zealand, it was New Zealand.
Money is money, and if you can film in UK where you get tax incentives and lower costs there's no reason to film in Hollywood.
Idk, the need to worry about cost fluctuates with how much you make. That's also true
Simple one light is different in NYC and Toronto.
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.
This exodus will remain until production costs in LA fall below the costs in other places, or LA can offer a measurable benefit compared to other locations.
Capitalism is a double edged sword - it allocates labor very efficiently, but when you are providing the labor, you don’t want to have that labor extracted from you too efficiently.
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.
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)
This is also why we get so many sequeals, remarks and reboots. It's a property with a proven track record. That's so much easier to get greenlit.
The other thing that happens is that corporations (including studios) can only increase profits by cutting costs and raising prices. And this last one has basically killed the ecosystem upon which movies (and TV) depend. Let me explain.
Once upon a time, LA was relativvely cheap to live in. This allowed people to live there and work on getting their break while working flexible, often service jobs. Waittressing, hosting, that sort of thing. It could be anything, really. But it has to be flexible enough to take time off to go to auditions and jobs and whatnot. It is very difficult to make a full-time career out of working in this industry. If you're an actor and you, say, get a principal guest role on a TV series you might make $1000-2000/day but you only end up working 1-2 days on that every 3 months. You can't live on that. Recently there was a piece on the actor who played Sam in Lord of the Rings having to sell his house even though he made $250k for the 3 movies. That was over several years.
This isn't just for acting. Lighting, camera work, production, direction, editing, writing, special effects, costumes, etc etc etc.
What sustained people were residuals and the relatively low cost of living. Residuals for TV basically got killed by streaming. A lot of movie projects became unsustainable when the VHS/DVD/Blu-ray revenue pipeline dried up. Matt Damon spoke about this.
But the other thing streaming killed was the network TV pipeline. A bunch of screenplays would be written (and sold). I'm talking hundreds. A handful of those would be made into pilots. These days that's maybe 10-15 per year. Previously it was 50-100+. A certain number of those went to a half then full series order of 22+ episodes. Getting one job could sustain you for the year.
Streaming came along. The residuals went away. Those 22 episode seasons became 8-12 episode seasons every 2-3 years if you're lucky. There was no syndication money anymore. Working people in the industry relied upon residuals in dry spells to make a living. And suddenly you needed 2-3 jobs a year instead of 1 and that's really difficult to get and, even if you get it, to schedule so they don't conflict.
And then obviously ticket sales in movie theaters were in decline and fell off a cliff with the pandemic. Starting in the 2000s you had the shift to save costs to places like Atlanta, Vancouver and Toronto. Productions started chasing tax credits all over the world and would immediatley leave when they ended.
Let me elaborate on just one example: writing. To get into this field you generally would start as a production assistant ("PA"). This would generally be an unpaid position initially (an "internship"). At some point if you didn't screw up, you might start getting paid. Then you'd be the assistant to a writer. This would give you experience in a writers room. Hopefully whoever you worked for would give you feedback and teach you things. The next step would be to get a staff writer job. Back in the day you'd get paid for 22 episodes. You'd be on set for filming and you'd learn production. Most producers came from a writing background. Eventually, this career would lead you to being a showrunner. Think Shonda Rhimes or Vince Gilligan or Matthew Weiner. Weiner in particular learned his craft and earned street cred as a staff writer on The Sopranos and he tried to sell Mad Men to HBO.
Now what happens if you get hired to write 8 episodes instead of 22 so you'd getting one-third of the pay. Your job is over before shooting starts so none of these young writers are getting experience to become producers and ultimately showrunners.
It's a bit like how some companies stop hiring juniors and just overwork seniors with the threat of layoffs. Well, those seniors used to be juniors. Don't hire and train juniors and eventually there won't be any seniors. Same thing.
I guess the short version is: streaming killed Hollywood.
As someone not in the USA who loves movies, it is too easy to get sick of LA and desert locations everywhere.