California and Los Angeles Democrats are willing to do anything to keep Hollywood filming in Los Angeles. Everything, that is, except making it more affordable to do so.
Democrats and Hollywood figures are worried that Los Angeles is on the verge of seeing its film industry collapse and usher in an era of decline, as happened with Detroit when automakers moved their industry out of the city. Gov. Gavin Newsom and his almost certain replacement, Xavier Becerra, as well as Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and her challenger, Nithya Raman, all recognize that the film industry is dying in Los Angeles.
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In fact, Variety published a list of productions for series that used to be filmed in Los Angeles that are now filmed elsewhere. Among them: the reboot of The Rockford Files (now filming in Georgia), the Little House on the Prairie reboot (Canada), the Scrubs reboot (Canada), the sequel to The Social Network (Canada), the 2024 Beetlejuice sequel (United Kingdom), and the sequel to Spaceballs (Australia).
California and Los Angeles Democrats want more special privileges and more federal help to fix their mistakes. That includes both state and local tax incentives (for the billion-dollar film studios) and a desired federal incentive being pushed by Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA), which would stack on the local incentives. What this ignores, though, is that California and Los Angeles are primarily responsible for the hollowing out of their own film industry because they have regulated it to death.
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Multiple producers and production staff members who spoke to Variety highlighted the union mandates in California and Los Angeles as an obstacle. This is common knowledge in Hollywood, to the point that actor Rob Lowe similarly criticized union burdens last year in his viral criticism of production affordability in California and Los Angeles. Lowe at the time said it was cheaper for his game show, The Floor, to fly 100 American contestants to Dublin, Ireland, than to shoot the show on a Hollywood film lot.
You could throw whatever hypocritical tax incentives you want, exempting millionaire Hollywood executives and billion-dollar studios from funding California’s massively bloated government. The reality remains that Los Angeles and California are run by unions, and those unions make everything more expensive and more burdensome, including film production, and filming in Hollywood won’t be meaningfully cheaper so long as that is the case.