Why Hollywood Films Everywhere Except Hollywood

Film production has steadily drained out of Los Angeles, a trend crystallized after the 2023 labor strikes and 2025 wildfires and now fueling grassroots campaigns like #StayInLA. The migration traces back to two forces: the blockbuster era of the 1970s and ’80s, which pushed shoots onto far-flung real-world locations for scale, and the 2000s–2010s IP boom, whose ballooning budgets sent studios chasing tax credits and rebates in cities like Atlanta, Vancouver, and London. For a big-budget franchise film, those incentives translate into tens of millions in savings, so the larger the budget, the likelier the entire production leaves the United States.

The economic logic has decoupled where stories are set from where they are shot. Toronto doubles for New York, Prague stands in for half of Europe, and critics routinely gripe about streaming films set in one city but obviously filmed in another. Yet the author argues the disconnect barely registers with audiences—most viewers can’t tell or don’t care, half-watching while scrolling their phones, which is precisely why executives feel free to optimize for cost over authenticity.

Underneath it all sits Baumol’s cost disease: filmmaking, like theater, education, and healthcare, is labor-intensive with limited productivity gains, so it grows relentlessly more expensive over time. That structural pressure, more than any single strike or disaster, explains why the studio backlots the author wandered as an intern now sit largely empty—white-collar offices deciding how the sausage gets made, with little sausage actually made on site.