Shooting days halved in a decade; the real culprit is tax subsidies, not AI
Los Angeles' shooting days plummeted from roughly 40,000 in 2016 to under 20,000, as production crews flee to South Carolina, Vancouver, and Dublin to save on taxes. AI is actually squeezing below-the-line work like lighting and makeup—screenwriters' turn hasn't come yet.
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Shooting days halved in a decade, driven by tax flight not collapse
The metric for measuring Hollywood's real output is ‘shooting days’—covering film, TV, ads, and reality TV. Los Angeles had roughly 40,000 shooting days in 2016, dropping to around 37,000 by 2019 as streaming squeezed cable. A brief post-pandemic rebound brought it back to 37,000; the 2023 writers' and actors' strikes crashed it to 25,000, spurring talk of ‘survive till '25.’ Instead, 2024 saw a drop to 23,000, with no rebound—now under 20,000, exactly half 2016's peak.
— Hayes DavenportState tax wars, not production quality, are moving sets to Dublin
Production flight is a race to the bottom across states and countries. Hayes's Eastbound and Down crew, based in North Carolina, moved to South Carolina when the state canceled tax credits, filming Righteous Gemstones there too. More extreme: Fox's reality shows and sitcoms now fly hosts like Rob Lowe and casting contestants to Dublin because Ireland's taxes and labor are cheaper. Meanwhile, Los Angeles' large soundstage complexes built during the 2016 peak face weak demand, and soundstage real estate is beginning to suffer.
— Hayes DavenportWriters' rooms have structurally shrunk from thirty to one person per season
Writers' room sizes are shrinking structurally. Hayes saw 30 screenwriters in a Family Guy room; today a ‘mini room’ of seven is already considered large. His recent project could afford just one writer to spend weeks mapping the season outline on a two-showrunner budget; the showrunners then wrote it themselves. Part of the reason: post-strike contract rules mandate that once a room opens, it must hit a minimum headcount and tenure, so production companies now skip opening rooms altogether—they prefer the Mike White model, one person solo, like The White Lotus.
— Hayes DavenportAI is hitting below-the-line work first, not screenwriters yet
Los Angeles is one of the least AI-friendly cities in America, possibly the least. Generative AI is deployed as a search engine, but using it in production invites peer backlash—a podcast guest faced questions just for a small AI element in a project. The real precipice is ‘below the line’: lighting, makeup, set design, production assistants. Once AI replaces them, job losses cascade through the local economy via City Hall's familiar supply chain. The new WGA contract added AI protections, but no produced show has been written by AI yet.
— Hayes DavenportComedy is hardest for AI to replace—and hardest to sell
Horror is Hollywood's most active genre—mid-budget films commercialize reliably, so studios invest, knowing the math works. Blumhouse spent tens of dollars on Paranormal Activity and banked millions; comedies have no such floor. This explains AI's path into content: AI can outline, can handle other genres partly, but comedy is hardest because you need a room reading lines live, voicing characters to feel if it lands—and comedy's production volume is shrinking in lockstep.
— Hayes DavenportScreenwriters have been fighting free content for years; AI is just cheaper
Hayes thinks AI fears in scripted content are overstated: for years, screenwriters and directors have battled ‘the entire internet, free, algorithm-fed straight to your face.’ AI can't frighten an industry already worn down by that. He compares news: a field battered by Google News for two decades, where AI brings cheaper more than upheaval—and AI, no matter how cheap, loses to free.
— Hayes DavenportProduction's collapse is starving the restaurants that fed writers' rooms
Hayes served Los Angeles City Hall from 2021 to 2024, witnessing production decline's economic ripple. Some restaurants, already pushed to the edge by pandemic closures, were finished off by lower production volume: writers' rooms order lunch and dinner daily; active sets mean hundreds of crew spending on-site and around the lot, and those meals sustained neighboring businesses. Declining production also warped tourism and city culture: Insecure drew sightseers to certain blocks; Venice's Instagram-lifestyle scene in Ingrid Goes West now reads like a time capsule.
— Hayes DavenportLos Angeles stopped making national-scale stars after the 1990s
Mainstream ‘star-making’ essentially halted after the 1990s. Millions-strong internet celebrities exist now, but no new George Clooney—the kind everyone recognizes—has emerged; the rare exception is Taylor Swift. Stars who broke in the '90s, Clooney among them, mostly stay in Los Angeles and keep acting, but how the public reaches them has shifted: not Troubadour nightlife scenes or Saddle Ranch, but bumping into Usher at the Hollywood Farmers Market.
— Hayes DavenportIn their own words · checked verbatim
And instead, shoot days fell again to under 20,000. So that is half of what it was in 2016.
Hayes Davenport2:04
It's been a bit of a race to the bottom across the country.
Hayes Davenport9:15
What a mini room used to mean to me on Family Guy. was a room of seven writers that would break off to go write one joke.
Hayes Davenport11:19
that's a threat to the new TV shows as well. The fact that, we are still competing against Family Guy every time we do a new show.
Hayes Davenport14:26
the genre that is the most alive in Hollywood right now is horror.
Hayes Davenport18:32
You can make a mid-budget movie that is commercially viable, that a studio will put out because they know it will make more money.
Hayes Davenport18:32
In fiction, in TV and film, we have already been competing for years against the sum of all human creativity produced and distributed for free, algorithmically sorted exactly to your specifications. You can't really scare us with AI compared to this.
Hayes Davenport20:32
There are very few people, you know, Taylor Swift, there are a handful of people that everybody still knows, but it's just, there aren't that many anymore of like those truly like stars. We all know.
Hayes Davenport28:52
Figures
| 2016 Los Angeles shooting-day peak | ~40,000 shooting days | 1:34 |
| 2019 shooting days | ~37,000 shooting days | 1:34 |
| 2023 shooting days after the strike | ~25,000 shooting days | 2:04 |
| 2024 shooting days | ~23,000 shooting days | 2:04 |
| Current shooting days (half 2016 peak) | Under 20,000 shooting days | 2:04 |
Glossary
- below the line
- Production-level crew roles—lighting, makeup, set design, production assistants—in film and TV shoots; collectively, everyone on set below the director.
- mini room
- A small writers' room with far fewer staff and shorter tenure than traditional story departments; often implies a lean operation and tighter budget.
- WGA
- Writers Guild of America; the union representing screenwriters in labor negotiations, recently adding AI-use protections to contracts.
How to listen
Industry practitioners and investors tracking film and content-sector policy shifts, plus anyone wanting to know which roles AI will hit first and which it's yet to touch.
The opening podcasting self-mockery banter can be skipped without losing the industry analysis that follows.