It's Hollywood, but not made in America

The Star

11-05-2025

IT would have been simple to shoot the game show The Floor in Los Angeles. The city has many idle studios that could have easily accommodated its large display screen and the midnight-blue tiles that light up beneath contestants.
But Fox flies the show's host, Rob Lowe, and 100 American contestants thousands of miles across the Atlantic Ocean to answer trivia questions about dogs, divas and Disney characters at a studio in Dublin. It makes more financial sense than filming in California.
In the past few years, as labour costs have grown after two strikes, producers of reality shows, scrappy indie movies and blockbuster films have increasingly turned away from Los Angeles to filming locations overseas.
Those business decisions have considerable consequences for the industry's thousands of middle-class workers: the camera operators, set decorators and lighting technicians who make movies and television happen. Frustration has reached a boiling point, according to more than two dozen people who make their living in the entertainment industry. They say that nothing short of Hollywood, as we know it, is at stake.
'This is an existential crisis – it's an extinction event,' says Beau Flynn, a producer of big-budget movies like San Andreas, which despite being about an earthquake in California was filmed mostly in Australia. 'These are real things. I am not a dramatist, even though I'm in the drama field.'
So, while shocking, US President Donald Trump's 100% tariff threat on movies produced outside the country to prevent the American movie industry from dying a 'very fast death' was not so fantastical.
But of course, Trump blames other countries who are offering incentives to lure filmmakers. As Trump had said in a post on Truth Social: 'This is a concerted effort by other Nations and, therefore, a National Security threat. It is, in addition to everything else, messaging and propaganda.'
Better incentives and cheaper costs
Productions have been filmed outside the United States for decades, but rarely has Hollywood work been so bustling overseas at a time when work in Hollywood itself has been so scant. Studios in European countries are bursting at the seams, industry workers say. And film and television production in Los Angeles is down by more than one-third over the past 10 years, according to FilmLA data.
Michael F Miller Jr, a vice president at the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, who oversees film and television production for the union, says that roughly 18,000 full-time jobs have evaporated in the past three years, primarily in California.
'We are allowing California to become to the entertainment industry what Detroit has become to the auto industry,' Miller says.
Plenty of production has stayed within the United States; 38 states have spent more than US$25bil (RM107bil) in tax incentives for film and television, leading to hubs in Georgia and elsewhere. (Some economists deride this use of taxpayer money as a revenue loser for those states.) But with established infrastructure and cheap crews internationally, more productions are now leaving the country.
Some Marvel movies, long the beating heart of Georgia's film industry, are decamping to Britain. Ted Sarandos, the co-chief executive of Netflix, says in February that the company – which has constructed a filming hub in New Mexico and is building another in New Jersey – would invest US$1bil (RM4.3bil) over the next four years to produce series and films in Mexico.
International sites often come with lower labour costs and more expansive tax incentives than those that California offers, making it much cheaper to film there.
Hungary has become one of the most popular locales. Aaron Ryder, who produced Arrival, Dumb Money and many other films, recalls bumping into actor Mark Strong at the Four Seasons Hotel in Budapest while he was scouting a project. He has also seen the producer Jerry Bruckheimer using a treadmill in the hotel gym, he says.
'You can walk into the bar in the lobby in the Four Seasons and probably see more colleagues or actors and directors and agents and people you know there than you can at the Four Seasons in LA,' Ryder says.
That is bad news for people like Josh Viers, a concept artist for more than 25 years. He says he latched on to three major movie projects in the past six months but was cut prematurely on each one when the productions moved to England, Australia and Hungary.
'I more or less have given my career, my life, to this industry,' says Viers, a 48-year-old father of two whose family lost its house in Altadena, California, during this year's wildfires. 'It just really hurts.'
Sometimes a movie calls for a California backdrop. And sometimes the cost of shipping props and people overseas ends up costing studios more than they hope to save with tax credits.
But more often, producers say, the cost of working in California is prohibitive. The budget is the budget, and those budgets keep getting tighter. Peak streaming is over, fewer people are going to movie theatres, and studios no longer get dollars from DVD sales.
'We're getting a smaller piece of a smaller pie,' says Paul Audley, the head of FilmLA.
In January, when the wildfires were still smouldering, producer Amy Baer wanted badly to move her upcoming buddy comedy from Vancouver, British Columbia, to Los Angeles. It would help her director, whose neighbourhood had been destroyed. And it would help her city.
But when Baer ran the numbers, she found it was impossible. To meet the US$10mil budget, her team would have to cut 10 weeks of work – a third of the schedule.
'The idea was, 'Can we take a run at keeping this in Los Angeles?' And the answer was no,' says Baer, whose credits include last year's 'The Apprentice.' 'We've reached a tipping point where we run the risk of losing the ability to make movies here for good.'
More countries offer generous tax incentives than ever before, and many of the programmes – including Germany's and the Czech Republic's – have recently sweetened their deals to give out rebates that are comparable to or larger than California's, with looser rules that allow more kinds of projects to qualify.
Unlike California, some countries allow productions to include residuals and the costs to employ actors, directors and producers when they calculate their expenses, driving up the size of the tax credit they get. Other countries make reality television and game shows eligible for a tax credit. Even without those incentives, filming outside the United States is often cheaper and more streamlined than filming in a state with a refund.
'It's criminal what California and LA have let happen – it's criminal,' Lowe, the host of The Floor, recently quipped on his podcast. 'Everybody should be fired.'
'Roll cameras, not luggage'
In California, its governor Gavin Newsom has pushed to more than double the available funding for the state's tax incentive programme. Under pressure from constituents and several coalitions that formed after the wildfires, California lawmakers have also put forward bills that would increase the base rate of its film tax credit and make more kinds of programming eligible. Another sticking point is the limited window of time to apply, which can pose logistical problems for filmmakers.
At a hearing in Sacramento last month, however, some state officials argued that many of the restrictions were critical.
'We don't subsidise any above-the-line work, anybody that has multiple million-dollar actors' salaries,' JT Creedon, a state finance budget analyst, says during the hearing. 'The limitations, I think, are our strength.'
Labour leaders says that they understood that Hollywood was a business, and that it would never cost the same to film in California as it does in Bulgaria. That is part of the reason Miller and others says the federal government must step in, although it is not clear what Trump's efforts to bring more business back to the US might mean for filmmaking.
The competition abroad is fierce. Labour costs in countries where the government pays for health care are often far lower than anywhere in the US, particularly in California. And the disparity has only grown wider, some say, after the studios and the unions agreed in recent years to new contracts that included wage increases for workers.
Los Angeles now ranks as the sixth-best location for filming according to a survey of studio executives by ProdPro, which tracks production trends. Toronto, Britain, Vancouver, Central Europe and Australia are all more desirable, the survey says.
Industry workers are concerned about the new landscape. During one unseasonably hot day in the valley this month, hundreds of them rallied for improved incentives to keep productions in California. 'Roll cameras, not luggage,' one sign says.
Recently, Nadine Mejia, 38, of Pomona, California, upended her schedule and arranged for child care to go to the hearing in Sacramento.
As a Hollywood labourer in Local 724, Mejia moves furniture around studio lots and lugs desks up the stairs of production offices. Theoretically. She found a single day of work in February and a single day in March.
Long a single mother, Mejia says she got married two years ago as 'almost a way to survive.' But these days, she says, times are so tough that she and her partner 'question whether or not even being together is affordable.'
When she is not working, her husband has to pick up the slack even though he, too, has children to care for. Should they sell their home? Go their separate ways?
'We've got one shot at this,' says Alex Aguilar, the business manager for Mejia's union. 'If we screw this up, this industry's gone.' — 2025 The New York Times Company
This article was first published in The New York Times,