Hollywood Exodus

Los Angeles’ film and TV production crisis has already become the dominant entertainment industry story of 2025, well on its way to defining the sector for the second half of the 2020s.

With even President Donald Trump weighing in on the issue, “#StayinLA” is now a cause célèbre for anyone with a vested interest in the future of Hollywood. L.A. Mayor Karen Bass also addressed the crisis last month, signing an executive order aiming to cut municipal red tape in an effort to incentivize local production.

And justly so: It’s no exaggeration to say that so-called runaway production, on both the national and global levels, is reshaping film and television in ways that will have profound consequences for the business, the workers who fuel the industry and even the City of Angels itself.

Now Variety Intelligence Platform unveils the special report “Hollywood Exodus,” a data-fueled analysis of film and TV production’s shift away from L.A., featuring the latest stats on where projects are going, the financial factors pushing them there and the economic impact on production hubs old and new.

The report lays out the crucial context for Hollywood’s current austerity and examines the root causes and far-reaching effects of production migration, which sent filming in L.A. plunging even below its historic 2024 lows in Q1 of 2025.

Extensive findings from Luminate Film & TV show the true scope of L.A.’s contraction as well as the key locations that have emerged in its wake. Insights from soundstage industry watcher StageRunner shine a light on how the boom-and-bust cycle in the content space has fueled a similar story for production facilities the world over.

Figures from film commissions, economic trackers and other agencies across the country and the globe detail how production has fluctuated over years of disruption and illuminate what the “new normal” will finally look like.

The data are coupled, as always, with VIP+’s meticulous insights on what this all means going forward, though the economic policies of the new Trump administration make prognostication even more difficult, whether or not that hypothetical tariff on “foreign” film production ultimately takes effect.

What emerges is a picture of an entertainment business irrevocably changed and a Los Angeles that — like another often-invoked U.S.city reliant on a single industry — may well be about to transform for better or, more likely, worse.