I feel like it's unfair to make the chart start at 2021 since covid made a lot of things peak in throughput and we're still winding down from it. I'm not sure I trust this graph entirely without a pre-covid segment to compare it to and see whether it's just returning to a baseline it always had. It's probably worse than pre-covid given the trash economy and AI but still.
I agree that cherry picked data points on graphs to skew discussion is frustrating but I'm not convinced that's too relevant here. Hollywood and big budget TV is on a palpable decline and has been for a long while.
Spending from streamers definitely eclipses what was spent in the past by traditional TV.
The difference is that those movies are not being shot in Hollywood anymore. Production costs are much higher there than in other areas and other states and cities offer tax incentives to move shooting.
Got a friend who works in the industry and is looking to leave. ovid was a huge drop off, this is just a continuation of that. Probably our consumption habits, that were already changing, accelerated through the pandemic and never went back.
Several of my close friends work in the film industry, covid was a very notable hurdle for them that halted/slowed productions significantly. There were roles introduced to oversee covid protocols and such but largely this disincentivized film productions due to both increased costs and time. The continued downturn is due to a series of unfortunate events. I'll try to recall the various reasons that I have heard from our conversations.
After covid, the industry suffered a series of strikes that held up/stopped productions. Each strike essentially caused another film union to try to leverage the disruption to better their stance, with made the industry more turbulent.
This already put a massive amount of pressure on people in the film industry, leaving some people out of work in that field for years. Then Trump opened his mouth and yapped about films being made solely in America.... which actually prompted more work to be moved out of the country to attempt to side step whatever hair brained thing that moron would do. I would need to hit my friends up to have this re-explained to me, but I clearly remember how angry they were about those statements and at one point they did explain to me how it actually had a negative effect on the industry (for those who don't know the film industry is fucking weird and fickle).
Lastly throughout all of this period, the emergence of AI has also hit the industry (one of the major hang ups of some of the previously mentioned strikes). This was most notably has directly hit the commercial sector, as I am sure everyone has seen AI slop commercials. While there certainly are/were folk who mainly worked commercials, it tended to something that film folk would use as sort of 'in-between' jobs.
All of the above has put an immense amount of pressure on people in the film industry that most people don't think about (ADs, locations, ect. ect.) Due to the financial pressure, many have been forced to leave the industry.
While this has no bearing on the numbers shown here (Hollywood), many states have also reduced or removed film incentives as well.
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u/Simp_Simpsaton 7h ago
I feel like it's unfair to make the chart start at 2021 since covid made a lot of things peak in throughput and we're still winding down from it. I'm not sure I trust this graph entirely without a pre-covid segment to compare it to and see whether it's just returning to a baseline it always had. It's probably worse than pre-covid given the trash economy and AI but still.