Hollywood Is Shrinking
Los Angeles after the production boom
How studio cuts, strikes and rival incentives pushed Los Angeles filming to its lowest since 2020, and what California’s $750 million tax credit has changed so far.
On Oct. 26, 2026, the L.A. Times ran a headline: “Skydance offers voluntary buyouts to some employees.” The next day it ran another: “As filming lags, L.A. City Council offers $1 a day parking fees and free permits for micro-shoots.” A studio offering buyouts. A city making it cheaper to set up a camera on its own streets. Same week, same town.
Both headlines answer to one count. FilmLA, the nonprofit that tracks filming in the greater L.A. area, logged 19,694 shoot days in 2025, the lowest total since 2020, according to the L.A. Times. In 2024 the total was 23,480. That is a 16.1 percent drop in a single year. The drop comes as L.A. continues to battle runaway production to other states and countries, along with the continued effects of the pandemic, the 2023 writers’ and actors’ strikes and cutbacks in spending at studios. California’s answer is a $750 million-a-year tax credit, and so far it reaches only part of the work.
Start with the unit, because it is the human part of the math. FilmLA defines a shoot day as “one crew’s permission to film at one or more defined locations during any 24-hour period.” Each day missing from the count is a crew that did not pull a permit to work. The California Production Coalition, cited by FilmLA, estimates that the average location shoot adds $670,000 and 1,500 jobs a day to a local economy. It is an estimate, not a measurement.
The end of 2025 was steeper. In the fourth quarter, on-location production totaled 4,625 shoot days, down 21.1 percent from the same months of 2024. Television shoot days fell 21.9 percent to 1,247.
TV production here peaked in 2021 at 18,560 shoot days, FilmLA says, and logged 7,716 in 2024. Television filming in Greater Los Angeles fell 58.4 percent in three years, by FilmLA’s count.
Some of that peak was borrowed time. The L.A. Times describes “a temporary reprieve during the so-called peak-TV era, when studios poured money into making shows and movies for their streaming services.” Then came the 2023 strikes. Unscripted shows were a staple of L.A. filming through them, FilmLA says, until reality production fell as well: “Last year’s reality plunge delivered an unexpected shock, and made 2024 the second-slowest year for filming in Greater L.A.”
The state’s Legislative Analyst’s Office (LAO) found that “filming activity following the strikes has shown no signs of recovering so far, with shoot days slightly declining further in 2024.” In 2023, it said, employment fell much more in California than in the U.S. as a whole. Over a longer stretch, California’s share of U.S. motion picture production employment fell from over 54 percent in 2010 to 46 percent in 2023.
The work that is leaving paid well. The LAO found that California motion picture workers earned over $2,700 a week on average in 2023, 60 percent higher than the state’s average across all industries.
The studios shrank alongside the count. The L.A. Times reported that Discovery’s 2022 takeover of the Warner assets prompted successive rounds of layoffs, and that in 2025 Disney, Warner Bros., NBC News and Paramount all laid off workers.
Paramount’s cuts followed the Ellison family’s purchase of the company in August 2025. On Oct. 29, 2025, NBC News reported, Paramount began a sweeping round of layoffs. CEO David Ellison’s memo described “phasing out roles that are no longer aligned with our evolving priorities and the new structure designed to strengthen our focus on growth.” The L.A. Times put the job cuts that followed the purchase at more than 2,000.
Paramount’s executives have also said what a deal for Warner Bros. would bring. Andy Gordon, Paramount’s chief operating and chief strategy officer, told analysts the company has promised more than $6 billion in cuts over three years. Ellison has said a Paramount-Warner Bros. union would lead to a surge in movie production, with the joint studio releasing at least 30 films a year.
Daniel Green, a former TV crew member who now directs an entertainment industry management program at Carnegie Mellon, told the L.A. Times: “There might be great advantages for those on Wall Street but I’m greatly worried about the middle-class workers in the industry.” He added: “People who are below the line are already suffering.” The L.A. Times reported that the production decline has left many in Hollywood without work for months or even years.
Production has other places to go. The LAO names California’s main competitors as New York, Georgia, New Mexico, Canada and the United Kingdom, and says Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom offer tax credits and incentives more generous than most in the United States. Netflix is building a studio in New Jersey and expanding in New Mexico, the L.A. Times reported, while also expanding its film base in Hollywood.
The Governor proposed raising the film and TV tax credit’s annual cap from $330 million to $750 million. The California Film Commission now describes a $3.75 billion program that runs five years, to June 30, 2030. Projects are approved through a Jobs Ratio Ranking, which the commission calls “a process to identify projects most likely to increase jobs and economic activity in the state.” The LAO says California is the only state with an explicit competitive element to its credit.
The early results are partial. More than 100 film and TV projects have been awarded incentives under the revamped program. In the fourth quarter of 2025, incentivized projects made up about 13 percent of L.A.-area shoot days. Some of that work came back from elsewhere: the action series “Mr. and Mrs. Smith” returned to California from New York and Italy.
One gap has been addressed. Most TV comedies are half-hour series, which FilmLA noted were ineligible for the state credit and so were targets for out-of-state competitors. The program now includes 20-minute shows, which FilmLA said could bring more production to L.A., particularly TV comedies.
The LAO does not read the credit as a cure. It found that the credit “likely increases the size of California’s film industry,” but that “there is weak evidence that expanding the tax credit would benefit California’s economy as a whole.” It also pointed to state evaluations in Georgia and New York finding that every $1 of credit returns significantly less than $1 in state revenue.
FilmLA’s Philip Sokoloski put it in one line: “Although our overall numbers remain low, there are dozens of incentivized projects that have yet to begin filming.” Until they do, the count FilmLA keeps is the plainest record of this city’s working life on screen: one permit, one crew, one day.
“Television filming in Greater Los Angeles fell 58.4 percent in three years, by FilmLA’s count.”
