Hollywood Is Falling Apart Thanks To Left-Wing Politics

The state of California has been in free fall since the election of Governor Gavin Newsom, and now the state's signature industry is in full-on collapse. 

For decades, California was the land of opportunity. Exceptional weather, natural beauty, geographic variety, and top-tier universities made it a destination for tens of millions of Americans. But over the last 30 years, the state has turned into a monopoly. A one-party supermajority of progressive liberals has done everything in their power to dismantle everything that made California desirable. And they've been enormously successful. 

It's gotten so bad that within the last five years, for the first time in state history, California actually lost residents. Gavin Newsom's extreme COVID lockdowns, mask mandates, and pseudoscientific COVID vaccine discrimination pushed out well over a million people in a single year. The cost of living crisis is at its worst in California, as the left's insane energy rules, regulations, and sky-high taxes make living in the state a functional nightmare. That's before considering the abhorrent social and cultural rules the state has enforced, such as allowing boys to play in girls' sports, or telling teachers they cannot inform parents if their child tries to "transition" genders at school. Then statewide and local incompetence let two cities burn to the ground in January 2025. It's insanity.

But the state and its incompetent leadership could at least point to the relics of a bygone era as evidence of California's success. Hollywood, the entertainment industry, and its associated wealth and power, was its signature accomplishment. And now, as a massive report in The Wall Street Journal has uncovered, it's in serious trouble.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

Hollywood Struggling Mightily Thanks To Classic California Behavior

In 2023, there were massive strikes by the actors and writers unions that shut down productions for months on end. Every part of the industry, even executive and post-production work, was affected. COVID lockdowns that the industry and state supported had led to a catastrophic decline in box office, as well as forcing content onto less lucrative streaming services. After years of turning its focus away from crowd-pleasing films with broad appeal, the industry's political extremism was finally coming back to bite them. 

Most within the industry were happy to continue with business as usual, pretending as though nothing was wrong or could ever go wrong. It's Hollywood, after all. 

Yet the Journal's investigation found that "work is evaporating, businesses are closing, longtime residents are leaving, and the heart of L.A.'s creative middle class is hanging on by a thread." 

At the end of 2022, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that there were roughly 142,000 people employed in the movie business in LA County. By the end of 2024, just two years later, that number had dropped to just 100,000. That's a catastrophic decline, and the speed with which it's happened is jaw dropping.

The industry is starting fewer projects than in years past, as the report covers. Roughly 30 percent "fewer movies and TV shows with budgets of at least $40 million began shooting in the U.S. in 2024 than in 2022." Then it went down again to start 2025. In the mid-2010's, the occupancy rate for studio soundstages was around 95 percent. Now it's dropped to the low-60's and shows no sign of reversing course. 

Left-wing studio executives, who support and supported Newsom and other far-left candidates, have moved production to other states or countries thanks to massive tax breaks. Redistributing wealth is great, unless it's their own, of course. California, slow moving and convinced of its own infallibility, was so slow to react to these obvious changes that adding its own tax breaks hasn't been nearly enough to stop the outflow.

Sure enough, LA's unemployment rate far exceeds the national average, and the population has declined by more than 250,000 people in the last four years. 

Stubbornness, refusal to adapt, refusing to account for competition, union demands, monstrous cost of living make long breaks between productions untenable. All of it has combined to hurt Hollywood. And there's little national interest in helping Hollywood through say, a federal tax credit for US-based films, because the industry has so consistently shown its disdain or outright hatred for its home country. The industry made its bed, and has no choice but to lie in it.