A crew is filming what will be a huge streaming release on a soundstage in Atlanta, one of dozens that have been constructed or extended throughout Georgia during the past fifteen years. The filmmaker is an American. A number of the performers are Americans. A studio in California provided the funding. However, the production is in Georgia because the state’s tax credit structure makes it far less expensive to be there than in Los Angeles, and no one in the industry is pretending differently these days.
It was never inevitable that California would dominate the entertainment sector. Geographical factors, infrastructure, weather, and the historical coincidence of early studio location choices made before anybody had to consider tax legislation all contributed to its creation. The decisions made by studios to follow the math wherever it leads and by other governments and nations to compete for production investment have gradually undermined such advantages.
Runaway production is driven by concrete numbers. A blockbuster’s production expense can be significantly reduced by filming in the UK, which offers a national film tax credit that applies at scale. Over the past 10 years, European crews have been immersed in Marvel and DC films, which are big-budget tent poles that used to be routinely shot on studio lots in California. Due to its credits, Georgia currently has a production infrastructure that is on par with Southern California in terms of studio capacity and below-the-line labor. Major building and lease agreements have been signed by studios in New Jersey. For years, Louisiana and New Mexico have been vying for mid-sized operations.
The displacement was further compounded by the globalization of streaming. Netflix altered the geography of studio investment when it showed that Korean dramas, Spanish thrillers, and Japanese genre shows could compete for the same audience as American films. It frequently makes more economical sense to produce directly in foreign markets with local personnel, local government incentives, and locally relevant storylines than to produce the same content in California and transport it around the world. By default, the content market is no longer American.
The picture has become even more tight due to the industry’s internal consolidation. Large-scale media mergers, as well as merger proposals that have consistently faced opposition from the WGA, lower the number of competing purchasers, cut total programming budgets, and consolidate decision-making in fewer hands. There are fewer green lights when there are fewer rivals, which reduces the amount of production work that passes through any one market. California receives a smaller portion of the total.
On the grounds that, in the absence of national policy, the US is essentially supporting production in other nations by refusing to compete with them, IATSE and other industry labor organizations have advocated for a federal film and television tax credit. That argument has been made for years, but it hasn’t significantly changed laws thus far. Although California has made changes to its own state-level credit program, budget-driven decisions still favor departing because of the disparity between what California offers and what Georgia or the UK offer.
Watching this happen is a little disconcerting because the industry that created Hollywood’s mythology and made Los Angeles a symbol of a certain kind of American hope was discreetly moving its actual operations to locations that didn’t bear that weight. The mythology endures. The work proceeds. The people who are most immediately affected by this gap in practice are the lower-level employees who established their careers on the assumption that they will always be able to work close to home.