Hollywood is hemorrhaging jobs at a historic rate

Hollywood is hemorrhaging jobs at a historic rate and almost nobody is talking about it seriously.

Motion picture employment has collapsed, now lower than 2015 levels, erasing an entire decade of gains in just three years.

At the peak in 2022, Hollywood had added 35% more jobs than a decade prior, a streaming-fueled gold rush of content nobody needed.

Then the music stopped violently and all at once.

A 30% employment drop from the late-2022 peak, with 42,000 jobs vanishing from Los Angeles County alone in just 24 months.

The industry blamed the writers and actors strikes first but the strikes ended and the jobs never came back.

Now we know why.

Studios are making far fewer movies and TV shows than at any point in modern memory.

US series premieres in Q1 2025 were down 42% compared to 2022, with some streaming platforms slashing their release slates by more than half.

California now ranks sixth in the world for filming location behind countries it used to dominate.

Nearly half of all U.S. film and TV projects are now produced entirely outside the country.

The people losing these jobs are not executives or studio heads but are sound mixers, set builders, concept artists, camera operators, and animators, the invisible workforce that makes every movie you have ever loved.

And AI is accelerating the destruction before the industry has even stabilized from the strikes.

One study commissioned by Hollywood's own unions estimated that 204,000 entertainment jobs across the U.S. will be adversely affected by AI within the next three years.

Three-quarters of entertainment company leaders surveyed already confirmed that AI tools have been used to eliminate or consolidate jobs at their companies.

In 2025 alone, the broader entertainment and media sector cut 17,163 positions, an 18% increase in layoffs from the year before.

The Wrap says the contraction will continue in 2026, with tech giants like Netflix, Apple, and Amazon now eclipsing traditional Hollywood studios entirely.

Hollywood spent a century building the most powerful entertainment machine on earth but now streaming overextended it, strikes fractured it and AI is now harvesting what remains.

Source: StockMarket.News