🌊 The End of Hollywood

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By Max Towey

California has lost a lot in the last few years: People, neighborhoods, businesses – even Ellen DeGeneres.

But none of that compares to what it may be losing next: Hollywood. 

For a century, Los Angeles has dominated the movie business for a very specific set of reasons. Increasingly, though, an arms race is underway to change that, as states like Georgia, Texas, and New York vie to steal cinematic market share and become the world’s new movie hub. The efforts are working, and a growing number of movie-makers are picking up shop and moving out of the state. 

California – which produced Star Wars, The Godfather, and Back to the Future – is now the filming location of fewer than one in five major movies. The rest? They’re moving thousands of miles away. 

So, what happened? Why is Hollywood fleeing Hollywood?

To answer that question, we need to know how it got there in the first place.

In the early 1900s, New York City was the center of the film industry because Thomas Edison held a monopoly on movie cameras. He helped form the Motion Picture Patents Company (MPPC), which pooled patents on cameras, projectors, and film, and aggressively sued independent filmmakers who infringed on the patents.

Seeking to escape the MPCC’s industry power, a group of rebel filmmakers decided to move west to California. 

And just like that… Hollywood was born.

By the 1920s, Los Angeles was the only place you wanted to make movies. It had cheap land; great weather, which made filming easy and schedules predictable; and a variety of landscapes, including deserts, beaches, city, and mountains.

And for the next 100 years, Hollywood was Hollywood. Movies weren’t just incubated there; they were financed there, negotiated there, and filmed in Hollywood’s iconic studio lots, where a western could be shot on one block and a romcom on the next. 

But things have changed. Rapidly, studios are packing up and leaving the very city they put on the map.

In the rest of this deep-dive, we explore why – and where the industry is going instead.

Editor’s Note

Thanks for reading! We’re curious to hear what you think about the shift away from Hollywood. Do you support states offering generous tax credits to expand film production beyond California? Is Big Tech preserving Hollywood’s legacy or reshaping it too much? Let us know by replying to this email.

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That’s it for today. See you tomorrow!

–Max and Max