How Hollywood stopped making movies in Hollywood — and what that says about modern media

There is a strange thing you notice if you drive through the flats of Los Angeles today: the soundstages are quiet, the trucks aren't circling the block, and the catering tents that used to spring up on suburban streets have thinned out. The Hollywood sign still sits on the hill, but a lot of what it represents has quietly relocated — to Atlanta, to London, to Budapest, to the Gold Coast. As The Times put it in a recent piece surveying the wreckage: why is no one making movies in Hollywood any more?

It's a good question, and the answer is more revealing than a simple story about greedy studios chasing cheap labour. The migration of film production out of Los Angeles is a keyhole into how modern media actually gets made — who pays for it, what shape it takes, and who it's for. For an Australian audience, it's especially worth paying attention to, because we are one of the places quietly absorbing the work.

The incentive arms race

The most immediate reason movies aren't shot in Hollywood is boring but decisive: money. Over the past two decades, governments from Georgia to Ontario to New South Wales have used tax rebates and cash incentives to lure productions away from Los Angeles. A studio comparing a soundstage in Burbank with one in the UK or on the Gold Coast can save 25 to 40 per cent of a film's below-the-line costs simply by moving the physical shoot.

California has tried to fight back, expanding its own film tax credit, but as The Guardian noted in its recent state-of-the-industry piece, this is "not the charmed industry it once was". The old assumption — that a studio would eat a premium to shoot near its executives, its crews and its lawyers — has quietly collapsed. Executives now expect productions to travel. Crews follow the work. And once a crew base establishes itself in Atlanta or Sydney, it becomes self-sustaining, drawing more work in the next cycle.

The result is that "Hollywood" has become a brand and a headquarters function — a place where deals are financed and marketing is planned — rather than a place where cameras roll.

Streaming rewrote the physics of a movie

The second reason is subtler. The economics of what a movie is have changed. In the theatrical era, a film had to fit inside a cinema's schedule: roughly 90 to 120 minutes, so a multiplex could turn the room over four or five times a day. That discipline shaped everything from screenplay structure to editing.

Streaming demolished it. As The Australian Financial Review observed in a piece with the pointed title "When Hollywood kissed goodbye to the 90-minute film", the tight, disciplined feature has been quietly replaced by the sprawling three-hour event movie and the eight-hour limited series. When your platform is optimising for hours watched rather than tickets sold, brevity stops being a virtue. Directors are given permission — sometimes pressure — to go longer.

This has real production consequences. Longer films cost more, take longer to shoot, and require the kind of ambitious location work that fits neatly with foreign incentive schemes. A lean 95-minute comedy could be made anywhere, cheaply. A 165-minute action-drama with a 90-day shoot needs a jurisdiction offering enough rebate to bend the maths.

What gets made — and what doesn't

Follow the money and you also see what disappears. When production is expensive, risk-averse, and shaped by global streamer economics, some genres flourish and others quietly vanish. The mid-budget adult drama — the kind of film that used to be Hollywood's meat and potatoes — has largely fallen off the release slate. So has the modestly budgeted comedy, and the romantic drama built around a single lead.

The Ankler recently profiled the filmmaker Susanna Fogel under the blunt headline "Hollywood Stopped Making Movies About Women", examining how she has had to work around a system that no longer greenlights the kind of female-led stories that were a staple only twenty years ago. It's a symptom of the same shift: when every project has to justify a foreign shoot, a nine-figure marketing spend and a global appeal test, the specific and the small get squeezed. Superheroes, sequels, and IP with pre-sold international recognition are what survive the calculus.

This is why the industry can feel simultaneously overproduced and starved. There is more filmed content available than ever before. But the range of stories getting made — the kinds of characters, the scale of ambition, the willingness to be quiet or strange — has narrowed.

The Australian angle

Australia is one of the beneficiaries of the exodus, and it's worth being clear-eyed about what that means. Village Roadshow Studios on the Gold Coast, Fox Studios in Sydney, Docklands in Melbourne — all have hosted major American productions in recent years, drawing on the federal Location Offset and state-level top-ups. Local crews have built world-class capability on the back of that work, and Australian heads of department now travel the world.

But there is a dependency built into this. When a production shoots in Queensland, the intellectual property, the profits and the creative decisions still live in Los Angeles. Australia gets the jobs but not the ownership. And because the work follows incentives, it can vanish the moment another jurisdiction outbids us. Ireland, the Czech Republic and various Canadian provinces are all in the same auction.

A healthy screen ecosystem probably requires both — being an attractive service destination and making our own films. The risk is that the service work crowds out original Australian production, because local screen agencies see easier wins in landing a Marvel shoot than in financing a homegrown drama.

What the shift really tells us

Zoom out and the story of Hollywood leaving Hollywood is really the story of how any modern media industry works. Physical location has been decoupled from creative authority. Financing sits in one city, filming happens in another, post-production in a third, and the audience is assumed to be everywhere at once. The film "industry" is now less a place than a supply chain.

That has upsides. It has spread skilled work around the world, given cinematographers and gaffers in Brisbane careers they couldn't have had a generation ago, and made previously unfilmable landscapes economically viable. But it has costs, too. The old Hollywood system, for all its dysfunction, produced a certain range of films — the kind of mid-budget, character-driven work that The Guardian and The Ankler both mourn — because it had a dense local network of writers, producers, agents and executives who kept bumping into each other. When you disperse that network across a dozen cities and reduce the number of gatekeepers to a handful of streamer executives, the range narrows.

The next time you notice that every new release is either a franchise sequel or a three-hour event picture, remember: that's not just a taste problem. It's a geography problem. Hollywood didn't stop making the movies it used to make because audiences stopped wanting them. It stopped because the machine that produced them — a specific city, with specific crews, working at a specific scale — has quietly been dismantled and shipped offshore.

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