>"If this has all drifted into bummertown, it’s because many of Hollywood’s problems can be traced back to a single economic theory of everything: the rent is too damn high. From there, everything else starts to unravel." 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…
How Hollywood stopped making movies in Hollywood
11–20 of 264 posts
Re: How Hollywood stopped making movies in Hollywood
#12Hollywood makes slop now, the last movie I saw was some iteration of Mission Impossible where the genius agent defeats the all powerful AI and that just felt like lack of imagination.
Re: How Hollywood stopped making movies in Hollywood
#13The article repeatedly mentions how production moved to Atlanta due to tax incentives. Even that is a race to the bottom, as Disney moved production of Marvel movies out of Atlanta last year to the UK where they got better tax incentives. Even the undercutting cities are being undercut.
Re: How Hollywood stopped making movies in Hollywood
#14I wonder if this will change as Hollywood is eyeing three $1B+ box office earners back to back to back this summer
But weren't they all made outside of Hollywood? Emeryville, around Europe and the UK, and then the UK for Toy Story 5, Odyssey, and Spiderman respectively?
A decent amount of odyssey was actually filmed on the universal backlot
Re: How Hollywood stopped making movies in Hollywood
#15The article repeatedly mentions how production moved to Atlanta due to tax incentives. Even that is a race to the bottom, as Disney moved production of Marvel movies out of Atlanta last year to the UK where they got better tax incentives. Even the undercutting cities are being undercut.
Why though? I thought Hollywood had their own accounting rules which always meant movies made a loss. What are they paying the tax on?
Re: How Hollywood stopped making movies in Hollywood
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
But weren't they all made outside of Hollywood? Emeryville, around Europe and the UK, and then the UK for Toy Story 5, Odyssey, and Spiderman respectively?
A decent amount of odyssey was actually filmed on the universal backlot
Which is cool, but also likely an outlier due to Christopher Nolan's usage of practical effects vs CGI. His clout probably helped with the funding of that tbh.
Re: How Hollywood stopped making movies in Hollywood
#17Nothing new. When I was in college down in LA I lived in a very small town founded by stunt people. Probably 80% of the people there were in the stunt business. Every few months they were off to another state or country for filming. Hollywood is just for the studio execs now, everyone else flies to whatever country offers the best tax breaks for them to film.
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.
Re: How Hollywood stopped making movies in Hollywood
#18> For a major blockbuster, tax incentives equate to tens of millions of dollars, freeing up money for name-brand actors, elaborate set pieces, and unremarkable CGI effects. Love the dig at the end.
To paraphrase Syndrome [0]: When everything is a explosion, then nothing will be an explosion.
[0] _ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_The_Incredibles_charac...
Re: How Hollywood stopped making movies in Hollywood
#19The article repeatedly mentions how production moved to Atlanta due to tax incentives. Even that is a race to the bottom, as Disney moved production of Marvel movies out of Atlanta last year to the UK where they got better tax incentives. Even the undercutting cities are being undercut.
Why though? I thought Hollywood had their own accounting rules which always meant movies made a loss. What are they paying the tax on?
Hollywood accounting rules are regular accounting rules (GAAP). The only reason “Hollywood accounting” is a thing is because of a bunch of actors who didn’t know the difference between “gross” and “net” points got screwed over.
Everyone involved still pays their taxes, but the special purpose vehicle used to organize the production is essentially a passthrough entity.
Re: How Hollywood stopped making movies in Hollywood
#20I absolutely don’t want to imply there’s any one reason that he led us to where we are. This comment isn’t to try to undercut or malign some great data and investigation. But an article on this topic that literally does not include the word union in the entire text is not painting a full picture.
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.