Hollywood Is Officially Too Broke For Woke
The entertainment times are a-changing
The Los Angeles media production job market is 30 percent smaller than it was in 2022, when credit became more expensive due to the war in Ukraine. So-called ESG (environmental, social, and governance) capital — Vanguard and Blackrock — could no longer afford to prioritize the engineering of western societies over profitability. It was the beginning of a decline in LGBTQ+ ‘representation’ and the beginning of a process that will likely result in limited reach for future rainbow-themed content. Economics, not ‘hate’, will force these changes. The trends have been underway for years already.
Two more of the devastating impacts on the Hollywood labor market were self-inflicted wounds. The first was the double-whammy 2023 strikes by SAG-AFTRA and WGA, the latter union demanding and winning new make-work rules that predictably resulted in a reduction of the number of shows and movies being made. The second wound, also self-inflicted, was the new Hollywood machinery of intersectional stunt-casting and creative talent pools selected by DEI checkboxes. Audiences stopped wanting what the film industry was making.
The slump in the Los Angeles media job market exactly correlates with the disappearance of the audience from movie theaters as the the quality of the movies plummeted. Too many dependable franchises and properties have been destroyed by woke programming, now: Star Wars, Star Trek, Marvel, DC, Indiana Jones, the list is long. Consumers voted with their wallets, leaving the industry financially exposed. First to go have been the underperformers.
A third economic force was at work that whole time, working both for and against Hollywood: taxpayer-provided subsidies (‘incentives’). Last week, The Wall Street Journal called attention to Democratic Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove of Los Angeles, whose district was previously represented by the city’s current mayor, Karen Bass, and a Burbank hearing focused on enacting a federal production tax incentive for the United States. Hollywood has lost production to foreign shooting locations with more generous government incentives.
In response, California has already raised its production incentive limit to $750 million annually through 2030. Qualifying productions can receive credits up to 35% of their contracted budget or or more. However, the phrase “qualifying productions” reveals a problem that red tape-addicted California creates for itself. Not only are the rules for shooting in the SoCal region onerous, requiring more use of more expensive union labor, they complicate the bookkeeping for innovative small producers.
For these reasons, the Golden State had already been losing production hours to other American states as well as overseas. Federal incentives will not fix the problems of California and Los Angeles that lost shooting business to Georgia, let alone fix the culture of Hollywood that churns out propagandistic crap audiences abhor.
