The Journal. - Hollywood Jobs Are Disappearing

Episode Date: November 10, 2025

Work in Los Angeles’s entertainment industry is evaporating. A desire to cut production costs, changing viewer habits, and competition from other filming locations are all contributing to a dramatic reduction in Hollywood jobs. WSJ’s Ben Fritz explains how the city’s creative middle class is bearing the burden. Jessica Mendoza hosts. Further Listening: - Ron Howard and Brian Grazer on Longevity in Hollywood - The Case of the Hollywood Shutdown Sign up for WSJ’s free What’s News newsletter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When I think about the people who make up Hollywood, I think of action stars, red carpet icons, A-list directors, and big studio bosses. But the vast majority who work in the industry have jobs that are way less glamorous. You wouldn't know their names, but these are the people who actually make films and TV shows, mostly behind the scenes. My colleague Ben Fritz covers the entertainment industry. They're assistant directors, their grips who hang the lights, their sound recordists, they're animators, they're working writers, they're production managers, there's so many jobs that make a movie and TV show work. Just think of the end credits or the end of any film. If you ever actually sit through them, they're really long, right? There's hundreds and hundreds of names.

These are the names that make up the backbone of show business, Los Angeles's creative middle class. Ben's been talking with a lot of these workers lately, and things haven't been good. What sort of things have they been telling you? They've been telling me that there's not nearly as much work as there used to be, just bottom line. And it's not one of those things where it's been slowly falling and slowly falling. It's not like the frog boiling in the water, you know? It's a dramatic drop-off. It happened very suddenly.

Broadly speaking, in L.A., if you're involved in the entertainment industry, this has been a very rough two years. Very, very rough. Ben, you've lived in L.A. for 20 years now. So this isn't the first time you've seen Hollywood go through a downturn. How does this compare to what you've seen before? Oh, as far as anxiety about the future of entertainment and people's ability to work in entertainment, this is the worst since I've ever been here.

By far, not even close. Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Jessica Mendoza. It's Monday, November 10th. Coming up on the show, Hollywood in Crisis. This episode is brought to you by Fidelity. You check how well something performs before you buy it. Why should investing be any different?

Fidelity gets that performance matters most. With sound financial advice and quality investment products, they're here to help accelerate your dreams. Chat with your advisor or visit Fidelity.ca slash performance to learn more. Commissions, fees, and expenses may apply. Read the funds or ETSs prospectus before investing. Funds and ETSs are not guaranteed. Their values change and past performance may not be repeated.

Hey, Thomas. Are you up front? Yes, we're at your gate. All right, I'll be right there. Late last month, Ben drove up to Silmar, a northwest suburb of Los Angeles. A lot of people who work in film and TV live in this area. Houses are more affordable, and the big studios are within driving distance. Ben was there to visit a member of Hollywood's creative middle class, Thomas Curley, a production sound mixer.

Welcome. Good to see you, Thomas. Walking up to Thomas's house, one of the first things Ben saw is a, big, beautiful orange tree. Do you plant this orange tree or is it here? No, this was here when I moved here. This is a lot of this is kind of what I bought the place. I just really like the atmosphere.

Yeah, yeah. Thomas bought his house in 2023 for $650,000. But the recent downturn in L.A. has hit him hard. He's barely worked since April of last year. Now, his mortgage is in forbearance. He never imagined himself in this situation. I thought that this house, if the career didn't pause, you know, that I was living below my means. I could have theoretically afforded a house twice that much if work never stopped.

You know, there's always kind of a thought in the back of your head that this can all stop. But I didn't think that that was likely. He didn't think it was likely because the previous decade had been really good for Thomas, and he was successful. His big break came in 2014 on the critically acclaimed indie film Whiplash. Five, six, and... They sent me the script, and I'd never read a script faster. It just was blistering on the page, and I was very excited immediately, so... Whiplash follows the story of a young jazz drummer at an elite music conservatory,

who becomes obsessed with achieving greatness. The challenge for a production sound mixer like Thomas, was capturing the actor's dialogue over live music. You've got Buddy Rich here. Thomas made it work by carefully layering the right amount of pre-recorded music along with recording live. Welcome to the 87th Oscars.

For his work on Whiplash, Thomas was awarded Hollywood's highest honor. And the Oscar goes to Whiplash, Craigman, and work in from Thomas Carley. Walking up to the stage, I was just trying not to pass out. I was getting short of breath,

and my mouth was dry, and I was getting, like, tunnel vision. Thanks, Mike and Dave. My crew, you guys are awesome. Here's your Oscar, yeah? Keep it on this bookshelf. Yep. Was there a lot of thinking about where to put an Oscar?

Where does one put an Oscar in? My options are kind of limited in this house, you know, but I figured a place of prominence is, you know. After he won the Oscar, calls for bigger budget, longer-term jobs flooded in. Thomas worked on the hit TV show Yellowstone for three seasons. And then in 2022, he got another gig that he thought would last for a long time, with CSI Vegas. It's kind of the dream job for a production person to be on a pedigreed television show that was almost guaranteed to go. for a very long time and possibly even time it out completely to where I could retire after the show wrapped. If that had gone for 10 years, I would have been set.

Then, in the summer of 2023, everything in Hollywood stopped. Hollywood has gone dark tonight. Sag after actors have now joined writers, guild members, on strike against the studios. So all of a sudden, production just came to a screeching halt. That's my colleague Ben again. And, of course, during a strike, there's no work. If you don't have actors, you don't have writers, you can't make anything. What was it that these workers wanted? What were they fighting for?

There was a variety of things. Some of it was the basic stuff of workers always want, which is higher pay and better benefits. But they were also very concerned about the effects of artificial intelligence, and they demanded protections against AI stealing their jobs, essentially. That was another big issue. We are being victimized by a... a very greedy entity. I am shocked by the way

the people that we have been in business with are treating us. And what were the studios saying at that time? What was happening then? Well, the studios, of course, were saying that some of these demands weren't reasonable, and they were saying that

the longer you're on strike and the more you demand, the more danger you're putting this entire industry in as far as how much production is going to get made. Finally, in the fall of 2023, after months of negotiations, the unions struck a deal with the studios, and the strikes ended. Many writers, actors, and production workers thought that Hollywood would simply start back up again. And for some, it did, for a while.

Thomas went back to work on CSI. But in the spring, the show was canceled, and Thomas found himself unemployed. My phone didn't ring for months. I was reaching out to my network regularly and talking to all my colleagues and friends and seeking out information like we do when we're not working. And there was a lot of speculation. There was a lot of, you know, just sort of out loud wondering about what's going on. And maybe the strikes are still having a ripple effect or something, but, you know, that turned into I didn't work again all year. Nothing was getting going, nothing was getting going. And people were thinking, geez, well, maybe the studios are just being really cautious after the strikes.

Ben spoke to dozens of workers, including animators, writers, and production managers, who all told him something similar. In the past, sometimes there have been slow periods, but they don't last too long. And the lesson everybody's learned is, like, just be patient. Make sure you have some savings to get through a tough time, and the jobs will come back soon enough. But it's been two years, and the situation really hasn't changed at all, if anything, it's gotten slightly worse. So it sounds like Thomas and these other workers you talk to, they really just thought things would go back to normal after the strikes ended in 2023, like even if it might take a couple years. Yes, that's exactly what they thought. I think people didn't realize that these broader macroeconomic trends coming down the road we're about to hit.

them like a semi-truck. Thomas and the rest of Hollywood's creative middle class thought that the studios were just easing back in after the strikes ended. But Ben says the strikes had created an opportunity for studios to rethink the entire business. That's after the break. To understand why Hollywood didn't get back to business as usual, you need to understand what was happening to the industry at the time of the 2023 strikes. The movie business had taken a nosedive when theaters shut down during the pandemic,

and audiences never came back in the same way. But more importantly, the TV industry crashed. And TV is really the economic engine of Hollywood. There's a lot more TV shows than movies. Back in the late 2010s and early 2020s, investors were betting big on streaming. You would have experienced this. Remember, there were so many TV shows on streaming. You couldn't keep up with them all just a few years ago.

It was all about growth. Wall Street just wanted to see these streaming services like Disney Plus and Apple Plus and HBO Max to grow, grow, grow, grow, grow, grow. Just like any young tech company, it's all they cared about. By 2022, the U.S. market was saturated. America seemed streamed out. That spring, Netflix said that for the first time in over a decade, it lost subscribers in the first quarter. Suddenly, instead of growth, investors wanted to see studios turn a profit. And the studios figured the easiest way to do that is to cut costs, to just make less stuff.

The streaming bubble was popping in 2023. And the strikes provided an opportunity for the studios to completely reset how much they were making. You know, it's very, in Hollywood, production, it's take a long time to get going, and you can't just turn on a dime, you know. But when nothing was happening for several months, it was actually an opportunity for the studios to really rethink how much they were making. And once they restarted in late 2023 when the strikes were over, they restarted at a much lower level than they'd been at before them. One data firm found that from 2022 to 2025, the number of major studio productions that, that started shooting in the U.S. dropped by more than 40%. And think about that.

Imagine if there was just 40% less work to do in any industry, right? That's like it would feel like a depression hit out of nowhere. A big movie can employ over 1,000 people for months. And a TV show can employ hundreds for even longer. So with fewer productions, jobs vanished. Well, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, at the end of 2022, So just before the strikes, there were 142,000 people who were working in the motion picture industry in Los Angeles County. At the end of 2024, there were 100,000 people.

So that's 42,000 jobs gone in a span of two years. In the best years, I was making over 200,000. With all those jobs gone, people like Thomas are now seeing their incomes plummet. I was actually making double mortgage payments for a while in an effort to pay down my house quicker. And I think this year, 2025, I might be under 20,000 income. But one corner of entertainment is booming. User-generated content. Some analysts say audiences are permanently shifting from Hollywood to YouTube and social media.

Why couldn't people just shift to working in the creator industry? If that's where the money is going, if that's what's blocked, There's just a lot fewer jobs and a lot fewer well-paying jobs in YouTube and especially in TikTok. Even if it's the highest level professional stuff, think of a show like Hot Ones, if you've ever watched that on YouTube. That's still being made by way fewer people than make a talk show that's on NBC or whatever. They're just smaller productions. And not only do these social media productions hire fewer people, they also don't pay as well. All the job is making content on YouTube and TikTok are not unionized.

And Hollywood is a union town, and the union jobs are the ways that people are able to make a good middle-class living. Yeah, it's like going back to Thomas Curley, it's hard to imagine, you know, a YouTube show sort of paying somebody like him $150,000 for a show on YouTube. Yeah, exactly. The industry downturn has been especially hard on Los Angeles. The city was already experiencing a production exodus to places where cost to lower. More and more big-budget movies are shifting production overseas. to the U.K., Canada, and Eastern Europe. Ben says what's happening in L.A. reminds him of Detroit,

when the auto industry fell apart and thousands of union workers lost their jobs. Just walking around L.A., are there signs that you can see that studios are shooting less? Sure. Well, there's just, you know, if you go to the studio lots where there are big sound stages, a lot of them are empty. There's just a lot less activity. There's two are people driving around on golf carts and walking in and out with their costume. students and stuff because not as much stuff as shooting. The way that they measure production activity in L.A. is how many days of shooting there are. And the level of production activity last year in Los Angeles was the lowest it's been since at least 1995, which is as far back

as the data goes. 30 years, like I guess except for the pandemic. Yep. Wow. Ben, what does this all mean for the future of Hollywood as an industry? It means that Hollywood may not ever come back to the level that it was at before. I mean, certainly people are always going to want to be entertained. There's no question about that. And there's always going to be a place for the sort of premium, high-quality productions that we're used to getting from Disney and Netflix and so on. But there may be less of it.

There may be fewer people working in it. And Hollywood may just be, bottom line, a smaller industry that employs fewer people. As for Thomas, he says, that if he doesn't get a longer-term gig by the end of this year, he might move out of L.A. I'll survive. You know, I'll figure something else out to do with the rest of my life if I have to, but I don't want to. Because as hard as the financial loss is, what's most painful to Thomas is that he's no longer getting to do the work that means so much to him. Like, I put everything into this. You know, I put my whole heart and soul into it, and I'm very good at

it and I there's nothing that should be stopping me for the next 20 years if I wanted to they can ask me to do anything anywhere and I'll make it happen and I'll make it good you know so it's not just that like I'm sad that I don't get to turn a wrench anymore like I'm sad that I don't get to create like I used to you know and help other people create the way they want to um and you know like money is money, but this is more than that. You know, it's part of me. That's all for today, Monday. That's all for today, Monday, November 10th.

The journal is the co-production of Spotify and the Wall Street. Journal. Additional reporting in this episode by Laura Foreman. Special thanks to Phoebe Unterman. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.