This month, The Wall Street Journal confirmed that “a precipitous slowdown in production” has taken place. Quite simply, “Hollywood is making less stuff” than before. “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.” According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, motion picture industry jobs declined from 142,000 to 100,000 between 2022 and 2024.
Screenwriters saw a similar drop in employment, so the intervening variable is the 2023 writers’ strike. Whereas the motto of the strikers was ‘Survive til 25’, in the fourth quarter of 2025 tens of thousands of creative professionals are unable to survive the wait for an industry recovery that is not coming. Work is becoming harder to come by all the time in Tinseltown. “L.A. and New York-based members of the health and pension fund that covers most behind-the-scenes craftspeople worked 18% fewer hours this year through mid-August than in the year-earlier period”, Ben Fritz reports.
Writers generally account for about 5 percent of the costs of production. Cast and crew take up one-third of the average film budget. The rest is production, post-production, and marketing. “AI can greatly diminish these production costs”, Stephen Macauley writes at Book and Film Globe. Most of the biggest films are now animated, so salaries can be reduced. As a result of the SAG-AFTRA strike of 2023, actors must be paid if their likenesses are used in AI content. “Animations might mean using voice actors. But, while there is still generally widespread use of ‘name’ actors for the voice work, usually for marketing purposes, were that scrapped, the whole salary part of the overall budget would be greatly minimized.”
In other words, the movie industry as we know it is already dead. The writers and actors have killed it. The future is Tilly Norwood, AI-generated movie star, who will sell any product and appear in any film for pennies on the dollar compared to Sidney Sweeney. AI movie stars do not respond to loaded questions on the red carpet or take up controversial causes to save the world. An AI ‘actor’ will not share an idiotic or divisive political opinion on Instagram the week before its movie premieres. The movie star has fallen to earth in flames, setting Hollywood on fire.
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