Hollywood Isn't Going To Survive If We Don't Evolve

I have watched the empty stages of Los Angeles proliferate like a slow-growing rot, even as global demand for stories continues to climb. Eight months ago, I delivered an analysis to the Hollywood Professional Association that was considered sobering, but returning to the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce with fresh data has forced me to be even more blunt. We are living through a statistical impossibility: production spending remains massive and streaming subscriptions are steady, yet on-set work hours have collapsed to a thirty-year low. If the art of storytelling itself is not broken, we must look at the mechanical structure of our industry with sober eyes and ask why our creative workforce is disappearing.

The crisis we face is not born of a lack of interest or the looming threat of artificial intelligence, but rather a collective refusal to evolve beyond the sunk cost fallacy. Hollywood has spent decades pouring capital and reputation into an infrastructure anchor—tools, networks, and legacy workflows—that now drags behind us while the world of independent creators sails freely ahead. We are instinctually diving back into ideology and techniques that no longer mirror the audience’s reality. While we defend empty studio lots, the power of autonomy has quietly beaten the power of infrastructure.

To preserve the creative middle class—the producers, cinematographers, and editors who serve as the heartbeat of our industry—we must confront the fact that our shooting tempo is tragically out of step with the market. Since 1995, we have never seen shoot days this low, with a staggering thirty-seven percent year-over-year decline in total production. The infrastructure is overbuilt for a workforce that is now criminally underutilized. Meanwhile, the creator economy has flipped the power structure entirely, rewarding performance and agility over union scale and gatekept seniority. When you consider that YouTube has paid over seventy billion dollars to creators, making millions of millionaires who write their own rules, it becomes clear that traditional gatekeeping is a dead currency.

Contrary to the prevailing hysteria, artificial intelligence is not the catalyst of this decline. Filmmaking has successfully integrated crowd simulations and face-tracking for years, treating them as extensions of our existing tools. Generative AI, while fascinating, is hindered by a flawed and inherently unsustainable consumption-based business model. More importantly, it is optimized for short-form, low-precision content, a sharp contrast to the long, complex, and emotionally coherent narratives that human professionals excel at creating. Our problem is not a technological ghost in the machine; it is the machine itself.

To rebuild, we must first stop expecting the new generation of creators to join our outdated system and instead embed our traditional expertise within their agile ecosystems. We must move toward an economy based on performance rather than relying on tax incentives to prop up broken business models. Finally, our physical campuses must evolve into infrastructure-as-a-service models—fully integrated environments where creators can walk into a facility ready with cameras, lights, and post-production suites rather than being hampered by empty, six-month stage rentals. The current contraction is a painful, natural right-sizing that we can no longer ignore. If we fail to evolve, the next golden age will not be found on Sunset Boulevard, but in the millions of garages where creators are already moving faster than our institutions ever could.