The latest quarterly report released Wednesday from FilmLA, Los Angeles’ film permitting office, confirmed the pain production crews have been in this year and signaled that it’s only gotten worse.
Shooting days slipped 5 percent over a three-month period from July to September to 5,048, marking the weakest quarter of 2024, and every category of scripted production lags behind five-year averages on both a per-quarter and year-to-date basis. A bright spot came in the feature film production column, which rose by more than 25 percent last quarter to 476 shooting days. FilmLA stressed that an expansion to California’s film and TV tax credit program is needed to curb the downward trajectory and keep productions in the state. It has been both a rallying cry and source of confusion in the industry for years.
One director who has made more than half of his narrative features in the state, Judd Apatow, recently spoke with The Hollywood Reporter at a starry industry fundraiser in Malibu on Sept. 23 during which time he was keen to talk about the concerning landscape of local production as well as that confusion.
“I’ve never understood why California doesn’t think they should have a healthy tax rebate for our industry,” Judd Apatow explained ahead of a hosting gig at the star-studded fundraiser Rock4EB! “I was just in Michigan and I remember they had a great rebate for a while and then suddenly they just got rid of it. All these people moved to town to create an industry there but then they all had to leave. Other places like Georgia do very well, and it must make sense for them economically because they’ve been doing it for a long time. They know the numbers and why it adds value to the state.”
Seeing the declines out of Los Angeles and California at large is emotional for Apatow. “It is heartbreaking to watch it happen because as people tighten their belts, there are very few situations where people can just stay in town because they want to. Most of my movies have been made in California — four out of seven — and all of them could have been made somewhere else but there’s an energy and a vibe to California that made it work.”
Apatow’s California-set films include 2005’s The 40-Year-Old Virgin starring Steve Carell, 2007’s Knocked Up with Seth Rogen and Katherine Heigl, 2009’s Funny People starring Rogen, Adam Sandler and Leslie Mann, and 2012’s This Is 40 starring Mann opposite Paul Rudd. Asked whether he would have challenges making any of those films today in California, Apatow said the greenlights are always at the end of budget equations.
“Everybody is worried about things cost,” he explained. “It’s just a completely different paradigm for everything. There are movies that we made with healthy budgets that they would want us to make for half as much and that wouldn’t be possible today, or we wouldn’t have enough shoot days here to make it look right. It’s more challenging today but you still just have to fight it out.”
Some of those battles are with algorithms, he added. “It’s scary because everyone has too much information and on some level, they are letting algorithms and [artificial intelligence] make decisions that should be made by the heart and the gut. That’s something we all need to be on the look out for these days. [Studios and streamers] need to be making things that don’t make sense. If you look at movies and TV from our past, if you pitched those projects today, they would not get made. Try pitching [Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 sci-fi epic] 2001: A Space Odyssey right now.”
While Apatow suggests creativity is suffering at the mercy of algorithms, audiences are also noticing a difference when it comes to the production exodus, both locally and in other major U.S. cities. “There’s a lot of Prague for New York happening right now, and you notice is when you watch movies. You’re like, I don’t know what it is but that looks like a very weird New York.”
