How Hollywood stopped making movies in Hollywood • Hacker News Board

Re: How Hollywood stopped making movies in Hollywood

#91

Post by fsuts » Mon, Aug 03, 2026, 6:10 PM UTC

I saw a Trump clip not long after his inauguration where he said he was unhappy about Hollywood moving overseas due to tax cuts but so far nothing.

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.

Re: How Hollywood stopped making movies in Hollywood

#92

Post by moate » Mon, Aug 03, 2026, 6:15 PM UTC

jarjoura wrote: post #58

AlexB138 wrote: post #13

The 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.

Not that you're wrong, but I could have sworn that Marvel production was always based in the UK. Post-production is very much still in California though.

https://discoveratlanta.com/stories/things-to-do/atlantas-ma...

Atlanta did a lot of the big ones.

Re: How Hollywood stopped making movies in Hollywood

#93

Post by moate » Mon, Aug 03, 2026, 6:16 PM UTC

saalweachter wrote: post #77

Theodores wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What has yet to be mentioned is why Hollywood, in the first place? 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…

My understanding is that an important consideration at the time was that it is very far from New Jersey. 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.

The irony here being that Netflix is currently in a massive layout to build a studio in NJ (like, 20 minutes from the old Bell Labs). Almost feels like giving that troll the finger!

Re: How Hollywood stopped making movies in Hollywood

#94

Post by datakan » Mon, Aug 03, 2026, 6:24 PM UTC

EdwardAF-IT wrote: post #66

datakan wrote: post #17

Nothing 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…

Aging myself here but growing up in a "movie set city" (definitely not LA) in the 90's meant getting rerouted on the way to school because The Wire needed our block again. It's funny to see how the article shows this wasn't just a local annoyance back then, but an early sign of a much bigger, long running shift in where and how Hollywood actually makes movies.

NCIS used to use my English department building at University as their Hospital. Star Fleet Academy in one of the Star Trek movies was the front of my school's library.

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.

Re: How Hollywood stopped making movies in Hollywood

#95

Post by moate » Mon, Aug 03, 2026, 6:25 PM UTC

anamax wrote: post #82

moduspol wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AI can't replace the notoriety part of why studios hire actors. 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.

> 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?

As someone who originally comes from a field that cannot be consumed by AI anytime soon (food service. AI can't actually be eaten) it's insane watching tech-dorks think "nobody actually cares about what they buy, which is why they will suck down all this slop because ultimately they just want output".

Some of us remember the story of the Luddites and hope that this time might be different with 200 years of social progress.

Re: How Hollywood stopped making movies in Hollywood

#96

Post by jb1991 » Mon, Aug 03, 2026, 6:25 PM UTC

bsenftner wrote: post #38

harrall wrote: post #23

The cost of housing is probably the #1 reason and, in my opinion, California’s biggest problem. 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.

I'd say it is the size of the population, far far too many people try to make it in Los Angeles without any specialized educations, so the car washers have 40 people that dry your windows, and the wait staff jobs are exponentially Orwellian. When I finally moved away, I was living over an hour away from Santa Monica, paying $4K a month for rent, and the entire neighborhood lights up every night like a gangsters' para…

4k rent for that environment?

Re: How Hollywood stopped making movies in Hollywood

#97

Post by babypuncher » Mon, Aug 03, 2026, 6:26 PM UTC

AlexB138 wrote: post #13

The 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.

Nobody really wins in a race to the bottom

Re: How Hollywood stopped making movies in Hollywood

#98

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Aug 03, 2026, 6:27 PM UTC

AlexB138 wrote: post #13

The 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.

[deleted]

Re: How Hollywood stopped making movies in Hollywood

#99

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft » Mon, Aug 03, 2026, 6:27 PM UTC

Tangurena2 wrote: post #50

bsenftner wrote: post #6

I worked in Los Angeles doing animation and VFX software for 33 years, and left 5 years ago as the cost of living there made no sense, and my prospects for work became nomadic global chasing of work now taking place in countries with no or ignored labor laws. (As if labor laws are respected in the US anyway.) Interesting in relation to the article, the author describes working out of the empty Warner Bros. lot; I liv…

My state, like many others, offers rather large tax credits to make films inside this state. > 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…

>so the movie theater survives on selling popcorn and stuff)

Apparently some of those profits now go to the studio too? Some of the deals being made sound borderline criminal to me.

Re: How Hollywood stopped making movies in Hollywood

#100

Post by andyfilms1 » Mon, Aug 03, 2026, 6:29 PM UTC

moronicles wrote: post #85

andyfilms1 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Man, this is so misguided.... 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…

Who cares about Oscars? It's about sales and mind-share. Ticket sales still have not recovered to pre-COVID levels, and they were already in a severe downward trend before the pandemic. 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 wor…

Sure, but saying that AI is the magic bullet to solve this is completely speculative. If and when a fully GenAI film is released and performs well at the box office, than I'm sure the industry will align itself to the new direction. But pretending like that situation is an inevitability is just wishful thinking...any number of things could, or could not happen.