A sweeping new report commissioned by ten major Hollywood unions reveals a dramatic and accelerating decline in domestic film and television production.
LOS ANGELES — A damning new economic report commissioned by ten of Hollywood’s most powerful unions landed Monday like a thunderclap across the industry, laying out in stark statistical terms what insiders have feared for years: after a quarter century of relentless disruption, U.S. film and television production is standing at the edge of a cliff.
The findings, released in a comprehensive multi-chapter document, paint an industry strained by the dual forces of globalisation and the seismic structural shifts that have remade the entertainment business since the streaming era began. At the heart of the report is a figure that should trouble every below-the-line worker in Los Angeles, Atlanta, and New York alike: the share of films made by major U.S. studios that were filmed partially or primarily on American soil has fallen 12 percentage points — from 66% to just 54% — in recent years.
The decline represents not a momentary dip, but a sustained directional trend that union leaders say threatens the livelihoods of tens of thousands of crew members, craftspeople, and support workers whose jobs depend on productions staying close to home. Runaway production — the practice of shooting overseas or in states with more generous tax incentive programs — has long been a point of contention between studios and labor, but this report frames the issue with an urgency not seen in previous cycles.
“This is not a blip,” one union official told Deadline, speaking on background ahead of the report’s release. “This is a structural collapse that has been building for decades and is now accelerating.”
The report draws a direct line between the rapid consolidation of the streaming era, aggressive cost-cutting by studios facing Wall Street pressure for profitability, and the corresponding reduction in productions that stay stateside. International locations, from the United Kingdom to Hungary to Australia, continue to offer tax rebates and subsidies that no U.S. state or federal program has yet matched at scale.
The document also flags that the 2023 dual strikes by SAG-AFTRA and the WGA, while ultimately yielding landmark contract victories, contributed to a production bottleneck whose ripple effects are still being felt across the industry supply chain. Combined with the ongoing audience fragmentation across dozens of streaming platforms, the report describes a landscape in which fewer productions are being greenlit at the scale that previously sustained the ecosystem of vendors, rental houses, catering companies, and transportation coordinators that form the backbone of Hollywood’s working class.
The union coalition behind the report is expected to use the findings to push for federal and expanded state-level production incentive legislation, as well as renewed negotiations with the major studios ahead of the next contract cycle. Congressional staffers on the House Commerce Committee have reportedly been briefed on the document’s key findings.
Whether the report prompts legislative action or functions primarily as a public pressure campaign remains to be seen. But its arrival Monday guarantees that the question of where movies and television are made — and who gets to make a living making them — will dominate industry conversation heading into awards season.
