For more than a century, Los Angeles has treated itself as the indispensable center of the American movie industry — the soundstages, the agencies, the deal-making dens, the myth that movies simply have to be made there. That belief has been protected like a sacred cow for a hundred years. It is now one of the most expensive superstitions in American business, and the industry would be healthier if more of it walked away.
The numbers no longer leave much room for sentiment. In the 1990s, California accounted for roughly 45 percent of all U.S. motion-picture and sound-recording employment, according to Federal Reserve data. That share has now fallen below 30 percent — a decline that has been building for three decades, not a pandemic blip or a temporary strike hangover. Georgia, Louisiana, and New Mexico didn’t wait for Hollywood to notice. They built real soundstages, trained real crews, stood up real post-production capacity, and backed all of it with incentive programs aggressive enough to make the math obvious. Physical production has already voted with its feet. What hasn’t moved — what remains stubbornly clustered in one of the most expensive real-estate markets on Earth — is the high-value work: development, packaging, decision-making. That’s the part worth asking about.
Technology quietly dismantled the excuses years ago. Development meetings, notes sessions, even last-minute rewrites happen successfully over video every day, in every other industry, without anyone insisting it requires a particular zip code. Writing, editing, visual effects, and a growing share of pre-production no longer require physical presence in Los Angeles at all. The talent was never actually confined to Southern California — capable writers, directors, and technical specialists exist everywhere in this country. Artificial intelligence is now accelerating the shift further, absorbing more of the concept work, pre-visualization, and effects pipeline every year. The claim that the industry’s “irreplaceable” relationships can only exist inside a handful of Los Angeles zip codes was never really about geography. It was about inertia — institutional habit dressed up as operational necessity.
That habit has a cost, and it isn’t evenly shared. Keeping the industry’s center of gravity in Los Angeles props up a status hierarchy that benefits a fairly narrow slice of agencies, managers, and executives far more than it benefits the broader creative workforce, or the long-term health of the business itself. When real estate and lifestyle costs become the price of admission, the industry doesn’t just get more expensive — it gets narrower. Projects that could thrive with leaner overhead, or a different regional ecosystem entirely, simply never get made. Others get made, but under financial pressure heavy enough to shape every creative decision that follows.
None of this requires writing Los Angeles off. The city will keep hosting major productions, premieres, and a real share of high-end work for a long time to come. But treating it as sacred — as the only legitimate home for serious filmmaking — was always a choice, not a law of nature. Every company already experimenting with meaningfully relocating resources isn’t abandoning the industry’s traditions. It’s reading the same spreadsheet everyone else can already see.