Hollywood is staring down a financial gun barrel it hasn’t seen for at least 93 years—not since the Great Depression. No longer seen as economically bulletproof, the movie industry is teetering on the brink.
Battered by subsidized competition from other states and countries, COVID shutdowns, and the crippling effects of back-to-back labor strikes in 2023, Tinseltown’s situation is dire. In just four years, annual shoot days in Los Angeles have collapsed from a post-COVID high of nearly 38,000 to near-COVID lows of 19,000 (annual “shoot days” are the cumulative number of productions taking place each day over the course of a year). Over the past three years, soundstage occupancy has plummeted from 90 percent to 62 percent. More than 51,000 jobs have been shed during the same period, 42,000 of them in the past 24 months. Where have the jobs gone? Everywhere but California.
Seventeen years after the first California production incentive was signed into law by Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, California Democrats have failed to keep pace with the competition. In a desperate effort to do something—anything—governor Gavin Newsom last year successfully pushed the legislature to boost the annual incentive cap from $100 million to a whopping $750 million—which would have been competitive … 10 years ago.
All this makes November’s gubernatorial election perhaps the most existential choice in Hollywood’s history. The differences between Democrat Xavier Becerra and Republican Steve Hilton could not be starker. As the Hollywood Reporter aptly framed it, the entertainment industry must decide “between the candidate they can live with who won’t help them and the candidate who can help them and who they can’t live with.”
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