A few days ago I visited the little picturesque town of Hope, British Columbia. While driving down the Main Street, I saw a dozen chainsaw carvings of wildlife. I thought, why does that one look like Rambo? Found out the first movie was filmed there in 1982. The movie took place in the fictional town of Hope, Washington. When the movie begins, you see Sylvester Stallone walking into town under the real “Welcome to Hope” sign that was in the Canadian town at that time.

I used to have a number of Hollywood studio clients and worked at a studio-adjacent company for a bit.

It's all about the tax incentives.

Georgia started the race by offering very generous (at the time) tax credits to pull production away from LA and NYC. It worked for a while, and Disney filmed most of its blockbusters there for 15 years. But the talent was unwilling to move to Atlanta, so the actual cost savings weren't that great. This meant Georgia had a U-shaped movie distribution: very low-budget straight-to-streaming-back-catalog crap using entirely local cast and crew, or really big budget movies. Very few middle-tier movies shot in Georgia.

Then London decided to get in on the act, and offered a ridiculously generous film tax incentive that applies to almost all film costs, not just the "below the line" costs (those related to actual production expenses, like crew, equipment, etc). The only catch was that the studio had to publicly disclose the movie's budget, but the incentive was so generous that studios were willing to play along. LA survived the initial blow, until the dual writer and actor strikes drew attention to the UK's non-existent labor protections, but Georgia was destroyed by London's incentive because its tax incentive was the only reason for Hollywood to film there (and filming in Georgia is down over 80% from its peak).

So then California decided to make its film incentive competitive again, nearly matching London's film incentive. But the geniuses in the state legislature wanted to spread the love, so the most competitive credit is only available outside of LA. Epic Fail #1. Worse, there's a fixed and relatively low annual cap for the film tax incentive, so only a handful of productions qualify each year. Epic fail #2. As a result, productions that don't qualify for the CA film tax credit generally go to London (for the incentive) or Vancouver (because everything is cheaper there even without incentives).

P.S. I was part of the downturn-related layoffs, so I no longer work in film or anything film-adjacent anymore.

According to this article about 1/3rd as many movies are made in LA since the 90s. They were only making 30% of films in LA in the 90s so your experience still matches with the data but having 2/3rds of the local film production move elsewhere is significant.

  The failure of Camelot (1967) caused American filmmakers to shift exterior shots from studio backlots to authentic locations.[4] The film was widely criticized for its cheap look because it was obviously filmed on an architecturally ambiguous set against the chaparral-covered hills of Burbank.[4]

This seems inevitable for most industries in the US (car/general manufacturing)

1. City/region becomes a boom-town based on a new high profit-margin industry

2. As that region becomes more wealthy, labor increases in price, thus there is more incentive to seek labor/resources for that industry outside the city/region

3. City/region hollows out of middle-class level jobs for the industry, retains ceremonial labor and executive offices.

>everyone else flies to whatever country offers the best tax breaks for them to film

once people are arranging plane tickets/charters, then they fly to the best place financially.

But LA/Hollywood.gov priced themselves out of the market first.

Is this Pioneertown, CA?

Aging myself here but growing up in a "movie set city" (definitely not LA) in the 90's meant getting rerouted on the way to school because The Wire needed our block again. It's funny to see how the article shows this wasn't just a local annoyance back then, but an early sign of a much bigger, long running shift in where and how Hollywood actually makes movies.