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How Hollywood stopped making movies in Hollywood

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Re: How Hollywood stopped making movies in Hollywood

#161

Post by stinkyball »

Theodores wrote: post #70
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.

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…

I too have experienced the light of Scunthorpe. ‘The skies reflect our labours’ as they say ;)

Re: How Hollywood stopped making movies in Hollywood

#162

Post by mistyvales »

andyfilms1 wrote: post #100
moronicles wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If that happens, I'll never watch a new movie or show again. I'm already hating a lot of Netflix-ified shows that pander to phone slaves with no attention span, so have stopped that dreck already. I have tens of thousands of hours of old films and shows to watch and would never finish before I die, so I am good.

Re: How Hollywood stopped making movies in Hollywood

#163

Post by esafak »

digitalsurgeonz wrote: post #12

Hollywood 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.

You picked such a commercial movie to make your case. Why not Bugonia, The Odyssey, One Battle After Another, Project Hail Mary, Frankenstein, etc. (all recent)

Re: How Hollywood stopped making movies in Hollywood

#164

Post by moate »

Animats wrote: post #105
moate wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pro…

> As someone who originally comes from a field that cannot be consumed by AI anytime soon (food service)... That's a cost problem, not a technology problem.[1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Xop9py8zBY

so I hedged with "anytime soon" (we'll call it 5 years?) and also robot food production is not "AI" as "AI" is generally considered to be software (and the hardware that runs it I guess like the chips/data centers) and robots are hardware.

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).

Re: How Hollywood stopped making movies in Hollywood

#165

Post by moate »

expedition32 wrote: post #128
moate wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

A hundred years ago they were practically giving away land in LA. The real estate value has flipped.

You, uh, you're not from New Jersey are you? I promise you, we're not giving away land around here.

Re: How Hollywood stopped making movies in Hollywood

#166

Post by nikanj »

throwup238 wrote: post #19
noja wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Movies like Forrest Gump, Return of the Jedi, Men in Black or Harry Potter 5 all managed to lose money, according to "GAAP".

If that's not creative accounting, I don't know what is.

Re: How Hollywood stopped making movies in Hollywood

#167

Post by wingworks »

mistyvales wrote: post #158
morkalork wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A staggering amount of film and TV is shot in Canada.

Almost every time I see a Canadian character actor I guarantee the film or show was shot there. Shows like X-Files, BSG reboot, The Expanse.. all loaded with Canadian actors

Most of the Stargate series were filmed in Canada too. If you pay attention you'll realise the planets they visit all look like Canadian forest, or an old quarry filming location.

Re: How Hollywood stopped making movies in Hollywood

#168

Post by wahern »

qingcharles wrote: post #143
wahern wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tax incentives these days include transferable tax credits. Even if your net tax rate was 0%, you can sell the credit to someone else, typically a bank. IOW, states and countries give you money, not simply give you a tax rate break.

What kind of dystopian fuckery is that? 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...

I'm not sure of the exact history, but it may have been copied from how affordable housing projects are subsidized at the Federal and state levels: https://sgp.fas.org/crs/misc/RS22389.pdf

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.

Re: How Hollywood stopped making movies in Hollywood

#169

Post by morkalork »

wingworks wrote: post #167
mistyvales wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost every time I see a Canadian character actor I guarantee the film or show was shot there. Shows like X-Files, BSG reboot, The Expanse.. all loaded with Canadian actors

Most of the Stargate series were filmed in Canada too. If you pay attention you'll realise the planets they visit all look like Canadian forest, or an old quarry filming location.

Even funnier is when actors and extras re-appear across series. Or the random extra has an unapologetically Canadian accent. Xfiles and SG1 are guilty of this.

Re: How Hollywood stopped making movies in Hollywood

#170

Post by Animats »

robocat wrote: post #153
Animats wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. 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.…

Can you link to a high quality example of a short drama? 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!)

Most of these things have awful plots. As yet, the AI systems used are not very good at plotting. If given a screenplay and character sheets, they can do reasonably well. But the "generate a 60 episode drama from one prompt" jobs are not very good. This is more of a problem with the Asian drama industry than the technology. There are not that many different plots.

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.

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