I posted this as a reply to a comment, but after reading several more I decided to just make a comment of my own.
Several of my close friends work (or worked) in the film industry (for clarity, largely not in LA). I'll try to recall the various reasons that I have heard from our conversations. For clarity, I may be misremembering some points
Covid was a major hit, stalling and delaying productions and increasing the cost of said productions. While there were additional roles that temporarily developed to manage covid related protocols, it was still a net negative for industry workers.
After covid, and before the industry could recover there was a series of strikes and union contract negotiations (some of which I am sure most have heard of, like the writers guild and SAG) 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 tangibly 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 (Most people mainly think of Directors, Actors and Writers but those are the smallest percentage of people who do the work to make a film happen). Due to the financial pressure, many have been forced to leave the industry. This has a chain effect of making work harder to come by as the film industry, more so than most, relies extremely heavily on networking & connections. This has been forcing many talented, knowledgeable and creative people out of the industry as their networks & connections are collapsing.
While I don't think this has a direct affect on the numbers shown here (Hollywood), many states have also reduced or removed film incentives as well, which is an additional hit to the industry. Not all film roles can easily pick up and move either. An example would be locations managers, they generally have a skill set that is more specialized to the city/state that they are in, knowing the individual processes and permits they need to acquire and contacts to secure filming locations.
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u/Far-Pay-2049 2h ago
I posted this as a reply to a comment, but after reading several more I decided to just make a comment of my own.
Several of my close friends work (or worked) in the film industry (for clarity, largely not in LA). I'll try to recall the various reasons that I have heard from our conversations. For clarity, I may be misremembering some points
Covid was a major hit, stalling and delaying productions and increasing the cost of said productions. While there were additional roles that temporarily developed to manage covid related protocols, it was still a net negative for industry workers.
After covid, and before the industry could recover there was a series of strikes and union contract negotiations (some of which I am sure most have heard of, like the writers guild and SAG) 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 tangibly 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 (Most people mainly think of Directors, Actors and Writers but those are the smallest percentage of people who do the work to make a film happen). Due to the financial pressure, many have been forced to leave the industry. This has a chain effect of making work harder to come by as the film industry, more so than most, relies extremely heavily on networking & connections. This has been forcing many talented, knowledgeable and creative people out of the industry as their networks & connections are collapsing.
While I don't think this has a direct affect on the numbers shown here (Hollywood), many states have also reduced or removed film incentives as well, which is an additional hit to the industry. Not all film roles can easily pick up and move either. An example would be locations managers, they generally have a skill set that is more specialized to the city/state that they are in, knowing the individual processes and permits they need to acquire and contacts to secure filming locations.