Hollywood is at the center of a perfect storm that is killing the entertainment industry.
The writers’ strike from a few years ago, combined with the emergence of woke culture infecting movie storylines is draining the industry of influence, money, and jobs.
The worst part for the people who work in this field is that there are no signs of recovery on the horizon. Things could actually get worse.
The Filmmakers Alliance reports:
Hollywood Is Dying—42,000 Jobs Gone in Just 2 Years
If you work in entertainment, you probably heard some variation of this last year: “Survive ’til ’25.”
Things have been bleak. In a recent article from The Wall Street Journal, the reporting goes as far as to call Los Angeles’ production prospects “a disaster movie.”
The numbers are stark.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, around 100,000 people were employed in Los Angeles County’s motion picture industry at the end of 2024. Two years earlier, that figure stood at 142,000.
That’s a loss of 42,000 jobs—nearly a third of the workforce—in just 24 months.
The decline shows no signs of stopping.
WSJ’s report paints a now-familiar picture—an Oscar-winning sound mixer who can’t find a gig, an animator who worked on Pocahontas who’s out of work. These are talented people having to recalibrate everything they know about Hollywood.
FilmLA, the official film office for the city and county, reported that on-location production was down 22% in the first quarter of 2025 compared to the same period last year.
Television production has been especially hard-hit. The region reached a peak of 18,560 annual shoot days in 2021. By 2024, that number had plummeted to just 7,716. It’s a 58.4% decline in three years.
John Nolte of Breitbart News recently broke down what he sees as the problem for Hollywood:
Why did the studios decrease production? Easy. All that content they produced failed to attract enough streaming subscribers to justify the production costs. And the reason all that content failed to attract subscribers was because almost all of that content was shit, and almost all of that content was shit because it was poisoned with social justice, woketardery, gay stuff, grooming, obnoxious girl-bosses, and smug, humorless heroes.
Why else is production down so much? Costs. The unions ensure that union crews are prohibitively expensive, especially compared to places like Georgia and overseas. Then you have the high cost of living in Los Angeles, especially energy costs, taxes, and housing. Why are living costs so high? Los Angeles is a Democrat-run city in a Democrat-run state. Democrats can do whatever they want without opposition and the results have been catastrophic. Millions and millions of illegal aliens keep housing costs high and wages low. Democrats despise cheap energy, and high energy costs increase the cost of everything else.
The simple solution to this problem is to stop making crappy woke movies that no one wants to see, but Hollywood seems incapable of doing that for some reason.