I live in Atlanta ("y'allywood"), a formerly big LA film outsourcing location. They shot much of Marvel and Netflix stuff here pre-2023. The unit below me has been rented to Winona Ryder and Dave Bautista.
Beyond that, my hobby is film and I know tons of people in the industry. I've made indie films with them.
All the jobs have gone to Europe. It's simply cheaper to film there now. Amazon and Netflix built infrastructure and taught local crews how during the pandemic content wars.
Looking at my Gen Z wife, all the eyeballs have gone to TikTok.
There's the answer.
How much vfx is being done by AI video editing software/ massive gpu clusters over previous locally employed vfx studio artists? Maybe I’m thinking about this wrong but isn’t the compute/AI vfx models now reducing the amount of humans needed to edit things like Marvel character’s special effects scenes, etc?
That’s really good insight! The graph only includes US employment. To see global employment instead would be enlightening.
yes and also movies have gotten worse (more poorly written)
They haven't really, it just seems like it, and for that you can blame better distribution.
When I was growing up movies were watched in cinemas. It was a big event and we saw maybe 5 a year.
Over time more start appearing on TV, but those tended to be a bit older, but also cherry picked the good ones. (I don't live in the US).
PayTV didn't appear until mid 80s. They had more movies, but again tended to cherry pick. VHS meant we recorded the ones we wanted to see. All these things together meant we tended to watch "good" movies.
Hollywood of course were making lots and lots of movies we never saw, or had and way to see. The bad stuff simply didn't have a channel to the world.
The arrival of Video Stores changed that. Suddenly the mediocre (and worse) had an outlet. And trust me, there was plenty of rubbish in there. But there was still a cost to distribute.
Today, distribution cost is zero. If Netflix commission a movie it'll get onto Netflix. Regardless of the result. Some really good stuff, most mediocre, lots of real rubbish.
Repeat for Amazon, Disney, Hulu, et al.
Overall movies haven't gotten worse. Objectively production values are higher. But your access to mediocre and bad movies has increased.
Judging past output though introduces survivor bias, which in turn makes comparison to today misleading.
No way. It is not sampling bias. Big budget movies have gotten worse script wise compared to the 90s and 00s.
The scene workers have gotten better though. And there are a lot of good movies being made still, but not by the mainstream industry that used to really deliver.
People don't usually re-run the bad stuff from years ago.
These are far more plausible explanations. AI can no doubt bring certain efficiencies, but for the most part consumers seem to be squarely rejecting primarily AI-generated creative output.
It's crazy how California and the LA area local governments killed their "golden goose" by driving out the film industry. I guess progressives can't stop themselves from doing that, but it's always sad to see.
They didn't kill the golden goose. Other places implemented tax benefits to encourage film making. That is why so much filming is done in Canada, New Zealand, and various Central European nations. If anything, the golden goose flew away. As a counterpoint: What do you think California and LA area local gov'ts should have done differently?
I’m not a fan of many progressive causes, but this is absolutely more an issue with globalization and easy ability to move jobs overseas to cheaper areas.
Absolutely, along with the rise in popularity in unscripted and nonprofessional content due to non-AI technologies drastically lowering the cost floor for production and distribution. AI will no doubt contribute to these trends, but I suspect its impact will be more evolutionary than revolutionary.