[music]

Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Is Hollywood's job market on the verge of collapse, and does that affect New York and New Jersey's? We're going to talk about the entertainment industry now. Studios are making fewer movies and TV shows than they were even just a few years ago. Remember, that was still in the pandemic era. The movies and TV shows that are being made are increasingly being shot outside the United States. What's going on?

We'll talk to LA-based Ben Fritz, who covers the entertainment industry for The Wall Street Journal. Ben wrote a story headlined Studios Cut Back on Productions and Jobs. On the Journal's website, that same story is headlined See How Hollywood's Job Market Is Collapsing. We'll invite your calls. If you work in the entertainment industry, if you live or work in Hollywood or the New York area film and TV industry, New York, New Jersey area, or anywhere else.

Hey Ben, welcome to WNYC. Thanks for getting up early for this.

Ben Fritz: [chuckles] Sure thing, Brian. Thanks for having me.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, help us report this story. If you work in the entertainment industry in any capacity or any place, what's happening? Are you having a more difficult time finding work now than just a few years ago? If you're in the Hollywood area, Greater LA, if you're in New York and New Jersey, or anywhere else, you can weigh in on the question, "Is Hollywood's job market—Hollywood writ large—on the verge of collapse?" 212-433-WNYC or ask Ben Fritz a question. 212-433-9692 call or text. Ben, as you report, Hollywood studios are making fewer movies and TV shows than they were making in 2021 or 2022. How dramatic has the drop been?

Ben Fritz: It's been very dramatic. Just the number of newly started productions in the United States fell from 251 in 2021 to 159 last year. Employment in the motion picture and TV industry over the span of just three years, from 2022 to the most recent data, dropped by 30%. If employment was down by 30% in the entire nation for everything, that would be like The Great Depression.

Brian Lehrer: Why would there be fewer movies and TV shows getting made now, even as the number of streaming services has grown so big?

Ben Fritz: There's really three reasons. The first one is that the streaming bubble has popped. In the early 2020s and late 2010s, streaming services were newer. They were all fighting to get consumers to sign up. They were all fighting for attention, and they just wanted to grow. All Wall Street cared about was growth. The quickest way to grow is just have a lot of new stuff that will draw people in. If you remember back then, just a few years ago, on Netflix, HBO Max, and Disney+, there were so many new shows and movies every week, nobody could keep up. It was amazing how much new stuff there was.

Then, starting around 2023, Wall Street kind of changed its tune and said, "No, we don't care about growth so much; we want to see that you can make a profit." This was, by the way, the same time the actors and writers went on strike. After that strike, the studios completely reset their production levels to try to become profitable. They slashed the amount of new stuff they were making. Less stuff obviously means less employment.

On top of that, Hollywood is struggling with the fact that a lot of people are getting their entertainment from TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. The more we all watch that, the less we're watching traditional entertainment services, which means they're making less money, they can afford less stuff.

The final reason is that, to the extent Hollywood is still making things, they're making more and more of them overseas. There's a kind of race around the world to get the biggest tax credits. A lot of countries and states are offering big tax credits, essentially subsidies, to draw productions. A lot of big movies now get made in the United Kingdom or Canada, seeing TV shows shot overseas. The United States is losing out to foreign countries. A lot of the stuff you see on TV or in the movie theater that seems like a Hollywood production actually wasn't made in the United States.

Brian Lehrer: I think Dylan in Saddle Brook, New Jersey, is going to help us report this story. Dylan, you're on WNYC. Hi.

Dylan: Hi. Hello. I'm a member of IATSE 632 for Northern New Jersey. A lot of our members work in Local 52 for the film local in New York and the Tri-State area. A lot of the hubbub is that the UK ends up getting a lot more films because they have the National Health Service. The IATSE bargains for health and welfare, and it's very expensive, premium health insurance. Most members get it after a few months of working in film. Going to the UK, the payroll is a little bit cheaper, and that's part of the problem.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you very much. Here's another listener chiming in via text. Listener writes, "Hi, Brian Lehrer Team, I work in the film Industry and visual effects. I've had to shift to taking more projects that are doing post-production in New York City. My husband, who works in the art department, has not worked at home here in New York City in over two years because studios are constantly chasing tax incentives. Though we do have tax incentives here, places like Budapest, Hungary offer a better one, so not only are they making less, they are constantly chasing better tax incentives." Ben, that's interesting, right? Our first two listeners chiming in, both talking about a lot of this work going overseas.

Ben Fritz: Yes, I think that's what really gets people's goat, so to speak. There's very little we can do about the fact that the studios are making less stuff, those economic factors. A lot of people are upset that Hollywood studios are going overseas and just chasing the cheapest place where they can make something. It's the entertainment equivalent of when a factory gets offshored. It's interesting, they mentioned Hungary. Hungary is the hottest new place where you're seeing production grow. Not only do they have generous subsidies, but people there work for a lot less money than they could work in the US.

Brian Lehrer: Orbán might lose anyway. Never mind, that's another show.

Ben Fritz: [chuckles]

Brian Lehrer: There has been so much change in the entertainment industry in the last decade or two. Who even are the studios now?

Ben Fritz: The studios are a mixture of the old Hollywood names you know, and then tech companies. Really, the biggest entertainment company right now is Netflix, which started in Silicon Valley and now has a big operation in LA, of course. Amazon is a huge player in Hollywood. Then you have the traditional Hollywood studios you've heard of, like Disney and NBCUniversal. Now, Paramount and Warner Bros are on the verge of merging if their deal gets approved.

Brian Lehrer: When we say Hollywood, that is sometimes just a stand-in for the American entertainment industry in general. We're already hearing from people in New York and New Jersey. To what extent is this actually a California story for the most part, because you're right that even though California more than doubled the size of the tax incentive, that if it offers studios for shooting productions there, those studios, when they stay in the United States at all, seem to see New York, New Jersey, Georgia as better options.

Ben Fritz: Yes. California, for a long time, didn't have a tax credit that was competitive with other states, so a lot of productions were leaving California for New York, for Georgia. California is where Hollywood is located. It's where the industry was born. It's where a lot of the people who work in the industry live. They moved here because this is where the jobs always were. Now, all of a sudden, they've been leaving for a long time.

The United States film and TV industry as a whole is hurting. California and Los Angeles in particular is really, really hurting because there's been the biggest drop off in employment here compared to any state in the United States. Of course, we still have the most workers here.

Brian Lehrer: Let's hear from another worker in the industry, Alexander in Long Island City, Queens. Alexander, you're on WNYC. Hi.

Alexander: Hi. Good to call in. I agree completely with everything he's saying. Basically, I'm a background actor. I've been doing it for a very long time, for at least 20 years. It really did start happening after the strike; it literally just dried up. Where you used to get your castings every day through your emails, and I would get 50 to even 100 emails a day stating different castings of things that were happening, now you're lucky if you get 10, you're lucky if you get 20 castings in one day. The majority of everything is non-union now. For someone who's in tech [unintelligible 00:09:11], it's literally you're just getting the breadcrumbs.

Brian Lehrer: I'm sorry to hear that, Alexander, but thank you for helping us report the story. From Long Island City, we're going to go almost next door to Gabriel in Astoria. Gabriel, you're on WNYC. Hello.

Gabriel: Hi, Brian. Everything your guest is saying is true. It is tough out there. I've been a freelance nonfiction filmmaker in New York City for 20 years, and thankfully, my primary focus has been post-production in editing, but I do some producing as well. There are no jobs out there. None of my production friends are working. I'm hustling like crazy, and I've never seen it like this. It feels like a bunch of chickens with their heads cut off. Nobody knows what's going on. My heart goes out to my production friends who are trying to pivot to post-production, but not everyone is successful. That seems to be the lifeboat that people are doing, but it's not that simple.

Brian Lehrer: Gabriel, I don't know if in Astoria you work sometimes at Kaufman Astoria Studios, but I read they are facing foreclosure. The legendary Kaufman Astoria Studios, which produced Sesame Street, Succession, Goodfellas, just a few of the projects that have been produced there in its century-long history. Are you involved with that at all?

Gabriel: Not directly, but I have many friends there, and they haven't worked in over a year or longer. Some of my best friends aren't working, and they don't know what to do. They're just sitting at home. I'm in a story here, and I see all these other production studios opening up. What's going on? I don't understand.

Brian Lehrer: Where do you see them opening up?

Gabriel: We have the de Niro studio, the studio that's over near the Con Ed, by the water. Wildflower Studios, I think it's called. That just went up in the last year or two, supposedly bringing over 3,000 jobs to the neighborhood. They're supposedly up and running, 18 sound stages. What jobs are being done there? I don't know.

Brian Lehrer: Gabriel. Thank you. Ben. I don't know if you know, because you're reporting from Los Angeles and that's a local take, but it sounds like it's not just studios going out of business; it's new studios popping up.

Ben Fritz: Right. It's this weird issue. It obviously takes several years to build a big soundstage complex. Back in the early 2000s, you couldn't get a stage. There was so much stuff being produced. It seemed like, "Oh, it's a great time to build." People started making plans to build. Now those places are opening, but there's not even enough work for the existing sound stages. All of a sudden, we've gone from a shortage of stage space to a glut of stage space. That's happening all over the country.

Brian Lehrer: Here's an NJ.com story from just a few months ago. December 2025 headline. "This massive new film studio is transforming New Jersey into Hollywood's biggest East Coast rival." It starts, "New Jersey officials on Tuesday," there, back in December, "held a groundbreaking ceremony at the future site of 1888 Studios, a massive film and television production campus planned for Bayonne." Where does that expansion fit into the picture of retrenchment? Is New Jersey the biggest US rival for Hollywood for these production jobs now?

Brian Lehrer: Not yet, but it is on the rise. Really, the one good news story for production in the United States is New Jersey. Because New Jersey has implemented the most aggressive and generous tax credit of any state in the United States. People tell me it's the only one that's truly competitive, like with the United Kingdom, for example. As part of their tax credit, they made deals with three studios to make long-term commitments there, which are Netflix, Paramount, and Lionsgate. They're going to be making a lot of stuff in New Jersey for at least 10 years.

Interestingly, I'm looking at some data right here. Between 2022 and 2025, production fell dramatically in New York, in California, in Georgia, it actually increased in New Jersey. New Jersey is still small. New Jersey is still smaller than those other states, I should say, but it's growing. New Jersey is the only good news, I would say, for film and TV production in the US these days.

Brian Lehrer: Some good local news in this story. There's a chart in your article, maybe that's what you were just referring to, that visualizes hours worked by production workers in the entertainment industry yearly. It shows that in 2025, production workers worked pretty much the same number of hours that they did in COVID-plagued 2020. That's a remarkable and depressing comparison.

Ben Fritz: Yes, absolutely. That chart you're referring to has to do with people who are in IATSE, which is the union that represents the vast majority of behind-the-scenes workers. That's really the heart of the middle class of the entertainment industry. Not the stars and the directors we've all heard of. These are the grips and the carpenters and the editors, the costumers, the people who do just good, solid middle-class work. Their employment has fallen 36% from 2022 to 2025.

Brian Lehrer: One more call. Here is Rachel in Manhattan. You're on WNYC. Hello, Rachel.

Rachel: Hi. Oh, Brian, I love your show. I'm so glad you're doing this segment because my husband and I both work in the entertainment industry, or we did. He's an editor, and I was an assistant editor. We've both been out of work from the mainstream industry since 2023. I think it's all because of consolidation of big business. There's three companies that control all of Hollywood. I remember my last job in TV, I worked at Viacom, and my husband had a job at CBS, and then the next day we both worked at the same company. We both worked at ViacomCBS.

Brian Lehrer: It's tough out there. Rachel, thank you very much. Actually, a few more people just called in on the Lionsgate Studio building in Yonkers and some other of these developing facilities that we referred to briefly before. Let me get one or two of these folks on here. Tom in Holmdel, you're at WNYC. Hi, Tom.

Tom: Good morning. This is interesting. I have been in the movie business since about 2010. I evolved into being a movie producer from being an actor, since actors are 95% out of work. I live in New Jersey, and one of my former employers, Fort Monmouth, is now building [unintelligible 00:15:55] Netscape, which is going to be the biggest [unintelligible 00:15:57] Netscape studio on the East Coast. Then you mentioned before Lionsgate and Paramount, I think it's 1888. They're in New Jersey, also. We have Wildflower over in Queens, plus other places. The problem is we have all these studios, as you just said, and there is a lack of product. I can see it going down.

One of my predictions was, and I'm a big supporter of Netflix, by building it for Mammoth because I was going to put together a small business team to bid it myself, but then when we heard Netflix, that was it. Deep pockets. Forget it. The point is that there is, you know, as you're saying, the product being produced that I see—and I'm very particular about product—is terrible. There's a lot of junk coming out. I'm talking to my neighbors about this, and other people in the business, everything from sound quality to writing quality to everything else seems to be not good.

Brian Lehrer: Well, is that just your aesthetic preference? Your artistic take? Or you think they're making bad business decisions for some reason?

Tom: Let me put it as technical. The sound quality, that's an example of technical. You can't hear the dialogue. They put music on top of the sound too loud. Little things like that, which affect how people accept what they're seeing. Now, as far as writing goes, yes, the quality is down. Some of the plot lines are terrible. When I review some of these things, I maybe shut them down in 10, 20 seconds sometimes, or maybe I'll let it go for 10 minutes. I like your guest. I liked this comment on that.

Brian Lehrer: Tom, thank you very much. Well, is this a unique take for you, who covers the entertainment industry? The product is bad. The movies and TV shows are bad, and the sound stinks.

Ben Fritz: I hear that all the time, I will say, but I got to say, I've been covering the business for 20 years, Brian, and people are always telling me how terrible the product is and complaining about it and things, but things go up and down. I don't think by any objective measure, if you were to go by rotten tomato scores or something, that things are significantly worse now than they were a few years ago. There's a lot of problems Hollywood has that are much bigger with whether or not some people think the writing is bad or the sound is bad.

Brian Lehrer: Everybody's a critic, right?

Ben Fritz: Yes.

Brian Lehrer: To wrap up, I hate to even say this, but your article includes what you call "the nightmare scenario" that you say may be playing out in Los Angeles, where a century-old entertainment economy is evaporating with no signs of a turnaround on the horizon. What's the range of scenarios for five years from now? It's not just the nightmare scenario. People must be trying to do something about this.

Ben Fritz: The big hope people have is that the United States will get a federal tax incentive. If the federal government offered a tax incentive that was competitive with what we're seeing in Europe, Canada, and Australia, and that was combined with the tax credits in states like New York and California, a lot of production would come back. Now that wouldn't deal with the fact that there's less stuff being made, but at least most of the stuff that does get made would get made in the United States. Anybody who's concerned about this should be absolutely talking to their members of Congress and the Trump administration and asking them to support a federal production tax credit for film and TV in the United States. If that happens, I think we will see. We won't get back to where we were three or four years ago, but we'll definitely see an increase in production in the US.

Then, the worst-case scenario, of course, is that that doesn't happen, and other countries can continue to offer more generous incentives and have lower costs than the United States do, and at the same time, people get more and more of their entertainment from YouTube and less and less from Disney+, Netflix, and so on. Then Hollywood just becomes a shadow of what it is; it doesn't make very much stuff, and it makes very little in the United States in particular, and the middle class of the entertainment industry would, by and large, disappear.

Brian Lehrer: It's always sad to me when cities or states, or in this industry now, countries, have a race to the bottom on tax incentives as the way to develop businesses, because then you get companies that might be highly profitable but have all these tax breaks and are not contributing their fair share. I've never found a public official who's really interested in having a tax incentive truce so that that doesn't happen. I guess that will continue.

Is there a bill in Congress for that federal tax break that you're talking about? Or maybe Trump is out there saying, "If you make more right-wing movies--" Is there anything?

Ben Fritz: There hasn't been a bill publicly put out yet, but I know for a fact that a lot of members of Congress are basically working behind the scenes quietly. I think they're trying not to be too public with it yet because things get politically polarized so easily in this country, and it would need to be bipartisan to pass. Trump has said that to fix this, we should have a tariff on movies. A tariff is impossible. You can't tariff something that's just-- This is data; it's not goods that come into a port, obviously. People are trying to convince him that a tax credit would be the right way to go. Certainly, I can tell you the congressional delegations from California, from Georgia, from New York, they're all very aware of this issue, and they're pushing to find a solution in Congress.

Brian Lehrer: Really interesting. That sounds like a scope. We leave it there with Ben Fritz, who covers the entertainment industry for The Wall Street Journal. Thanks for some time today. We really appreciate.

Ben Fritz: Sure. It's my pleasure. Brian.

Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. We'll end on a flowery, positive note for the end of the week after this.

Copyright © 2026 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.