Hollywood’s Production Exodus: 12 Things to Know About the Unions’ 25-Year Report

By the Filmoria News Desk

On 5 October 2026, seven Hollywood unions, including the DGA, SAG-AFTRA, IATSE, the Teamsters and both Writers Guilds, published an EY study showing that the share of major-studio film production spending in the United States fell from 74% in 1999 to 42% in 2024, while TV fell from 94% to 64%. The unions are using the report to push Congress to pass the Motion Picture, Television, and Entertainment Revitalization Act, a 20% federal tax credit on US labour costs that could rise to 30%. For British viewers nothing changes on screen yet, but the UK, which logged a record £6.8 billion of film and high-end TV production spend in 2025, is one of the countries the bill is designed to compete with.

This is a list of the 12 most important things to know about the Hollywood unions’ production-location report and the federal tax credit it is meant to unlock. We ordered the items by how directly they come from the report itself, starting with its core numbers, then moving through the political push, the cost argument and, finally, what it all means for Britain’s studios.

1. The Headline Collapse in Film Spending (EY QUEST, 1999 to 2024)

What makes it stand out: It’s the first union-backed study to track where Hollywood’s money has gone across a full quarter-century rather than a single bad year.

Key data: The US share of major-studio spending on films shot partly or primarily in America fell 32 percentage points, from 74% in 1999 to 42% in 2024.

Why it matters: It turns a long-running complaint about “runaway production” into a single, quotable number that lawmakers can put on a slide.

People in Los Angeles have been grumbling about shoots leaving town since at least the late 1990s, when Canada’s tax credits started pulling TV movies and mid-budget features north. What has been missing is a clean, long-run figure. This report gives them one. In 1999, roughly three of every four dollars the big studios spent on making live-action, scripted films stayed in the US. By 2024 it was fewer than half.

The scope matters here. EY looked only at scripted, live-action productions from the major studios, so animation, documentaries, reality TV and most independent film sit outside the numbers. That’s sensible, because those are the productions with the biggest crews and the most movable budgets, but it means the report isn’t a portrait of the whole American screen economy. It’s a portrait of the part that the unions’ members depend on most.

The other thing worth noticing is the phrase “partially or primarily”. A film that shoots a few weeks in Atlanta and then decamps to Hertfordshire for its stage work still partly counts as American. So if anything, the headline figure may flatter the US position rather than exaggerate the decline.

2. Television Has Fallen Almost as Far (EY QUEST, 1999 to 2024)

What makes it stand out: TV was supposed to be the safe bit, the steady episodic work that kept crews employed between blockbusters.

Key data: The US share of studio TV production spending fell from 94% to 64%, and the share of TV episodes filmed in the US dropped from 96% to 70%.

Why it matters: Series work is the bread-and-butter income for grips, electricians, hair and make-up, drivers and background actors, so a 30-point fall hits the widest range of union members.

In 1999 almost all American studio television was made in America. That stopped being true during the streaming boom, when platforms started bankrolling prestige series with feature-sized budgets and began shopping them around the world for the best incentive. Think of the volume of high-end drama now made at UK stages, in Budapest, on the Gold Coast or in Vancouver.

There’s a subtle split in the numbers, too. The episode share fell 26 points, but the spending share fell 30. That gap suggests the most expensive shows are the ones most likely to leave, which lines up with how incentives work: the bigger the budget, the bigger the rebate cheque, and the more it’s worth a producer’s while to move an entire crew overseas. A cheap procedural can stay in Los Angeles. A dragon-and-castles epic with a nine-figure budget almost never does.

3. The Jobs Number Behind the Money (EY QUEST, Cast and Crew Share)

What makes it stand out: It measures people, not dollars, which is the number union leaders really care about.

Key data: The share of cast and crew working on major-studio films made partly or primarily in the US fell from 72% to 43%; for TV it fell 28 points, from 86% to 58%.

Why it matters: It’s the clearest evidence yet that the decline isn’t just accounting, it’s American workers losing days on set.

Money can move for all sorts of reasons. A studio might shoot in America but book its VFX in London or Montreal, and the spend figure would dip without a single US crew member losing a day. The cast and crew figure is harder to argue with. In 1999, close to three-quarters of the people working on these films were on American productions. Now it’s well under half.

That shift is why this report carries the names of the Teamsters and LIUNA, the labourers’ union, alongside the more familiar creative guilds. Drivers, construction crews and set builders are the workers least able to follow a production overseas. A cinematographer or a star can fly to Pinewood. A Local 399 driver can’t commute there from Burbank. When the report talks about job losses, it’s mostly talking about them.

4. Blockbusters Left Fastest (EY QUEST, the 25 Most Expensive Films)

What makes it stand out: The biggest films, the ones that employ the most people, have moved abroad faster than anything else.

Key data: For the 25 most expensive studio films each year, the US share fell from 74% to 34%; those 25 films are a quarter of all major-studio films but account for about half the crew and two-thirds of the budgets.

Why it matters: Lose a tentpole and you lose a year of work for hundreds of people, which is why the unions single this category out.

This is the finding that should get the most attention, and probably will. A 34% share means only about a third of the money spent on Hollywood’s biggest films now goes to shoots in the United States. You don’t have to look far for examples. Marvel’s Avengers: Doomsday shot from April to September 2025 at Pinewood Studios in England, with location work elsewhere in England and in Bahrain. Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, a Universal release, went to the Peloponnese, Morocco, Iceland and Scotland’s Moray coast.

Nolan’s case is slightly different, of course. Some films travel because the story demands real landscapes, and no tax credit in Georgia is going to turn Atlanta into the Aegean. But stage-heavy superhero films are another matter. Their worlds are mostly built in studios and on computers, so where they’re made comes down largely to cost, crew depth and the size of the rebate. That’s the business the unions want back, and it’s the business British studios have been winning.

5. The $4 Billion a Year the US Says It’s Losing (EY QUEST Estimate)

What makes it stand out: It’s the report’s attempt to put a price on the lost market share.

Key data: If the US had held its 1999 market share, the report says, about $4 billion more would be spent on film and TV production in America every year.

Why it matters: It gives Congress a figure to weigh against the cost of a federal tax credit.

Four billion dollars a year is a big number, but it’s worth putting it next to some others. BFI figures put the UK’s entire 2025 film and high-end TV production spend at £6.8 billion. So the money the US says it’s lost each year is equivalent to a large slice of Britain’s whole industry, not all of which, obviously, came from American studios.

It’s also a counterfactual, and counterfactuals are always a bit slippery. It assumes that if American incentives had kept pace, studios would have spent the same total and simply spent more of it at home. Critics of film subsidies argue the opposite: that some productions would simply have cost more, or not been made at all. The unions’ position is that the lost spending is real and recoverable. Expect that argument to run right through the debate over the bill.

6. Seven Unions Speaking With One Voice (DGA, IATSE, LIUNA, SAG-AFTRA, Teamsters, WGAE, WGAW)

What makes it stand out: Hollywood’s unions don’t often release joint research, and this coalition runs from writers and directors to labourers and drivers.

Key data: The report was released on 5 October 2026 by the Directors Guild of America, IATSE, LIUNA, SAG-AFTRA, the Teamsters, the Writers Guild of America East and the Writers Guild of America West.

Why it matters: A united front from above-the-line and below-the-line unions is much harder for Congress to dismiss as special pleading.

Only three years ago, the writers’ and actors’ strikes of 2023 shut down American production for months. Those strikes were about streaming residuals and AI, and they pitted the guilds against the studios. This time the unions and the studios want the same thing, and that’s part of what makes the report significant. The Motion Picture Association, which represents the major studios, has commissioned its own research supporting a federal credit.

The choice of EY is telling, too. Union-commissioned studies are usually waved away as advocacy. Hiring a big-four accounting firm’s economics unit, and limiting the study to verifiable studio production data, is a way of making the numbers harder to attack. Whether it works will depend on how willing sceptics in Washington are to accept EY’s methodology once the full report gets picked apart.

7. The Bill the Report Is Built to Sell (Motion Picture, Television, and Entertainment Revitalization Act, 2026)

What makes it stand out: It would be the first federal film and TV production incentive in US history.

Key data: Introduced on 24 September 2026, it offers a 20% base credit on qualified US labour costs, above and below the line, with bonuses that can lift it to a 30% cap.

Why it matters: A national credit stacked on top of state incentives would narrow the gap with the UK’s 34% Audio-Visual Expenditure Credit for the first time.

The bill is bipartisan and bicameral. In the Senate it’s led by Tim Scott, a Republican from South Carolina, and Adam Schiff, a California Democrat. In the House, the sponsors include Republicans Nathaniel Moran of Texas and Brian Jack of Georgia alongside Democrats Laura Friedman and Linda Sánchez of California. It followed a 31 August social media post from President Trump calling for “Federal Tax Incentives in order to Make our Movie and Television Production Business GREAT AGAIN.”

The mechanics are fairly specific. A qualifying production is a feature film, TV pilot or TV season that costs more than $1 million and shoots at least 75% of its principal photography days in the United States. There’s a 5-point bonus for filming in a federally declared disaster area, which would cover the whole of Los Angeles County until January 2030 because of the 2025 wildfires. Further bonuses exist for independent films, rural opportunity zones and productions spending at least $10 million in qualified wages across ten or more states.

That 75% rule is the part British studios should watch. It’s designed to stop a production pocketing the federal credit while shooting most of its days abroad. In practice, it forces a choice: stay mostly in America and collect the full credit, or go overseas and get nothing from Washington.

8. The Glendale Rally and Schiff’s “So Close” Line (Alex Theatre, 6 October 2026)

What makes it stand out: It moved the campaign from a press release to the street the day after the report landed.

Key data: Sen. Adam Schiff and Reps. Laura Friedman, Maxine Waters, Judy Chu, Linda Sánchez, Pete Aguilar, Ted Lieu, David Min and Derek Tran gathered with union representatives outside the Alex Theatre in Glendale.

Why it matters: Schiff publicly set the goal of passing the credit this year, raising the stakes for the lame-duck session after November’s midterms.

The timing was carefully planned. The report dropped on Monday. On Tuesday, California Democrats stood outside a historic cinema in roughly 100-degree heat with representatives from IATSE, SAG-AFTRA, the WGA, the DGA, the Teamsters and LIUNA. Schiff told the crowd: “We are so close to getting this done. Whatever we can do to get this done, that is job number one. It just can’t wait. It’s too important. The losses so far have been too extraordinary.”

It’s worth reading that alongside his own caution from September, when he said the credit wasn’t a done deal but was close. The rally line is more urgent, and you can see why. The obvious vehicle is a year-end tax package, and if that window shuts, the bill goes back into a new Congress in 2027 with all the uncertainty that brings. Some supporters have conceded that 2027 may be more realistic.

Note, too, who was at the rally. All the members of Congress named were Democrats, despite the bill’s Republican co-sponsors. Keeping the bill genuinely bipartisan, rather than a Los Angeles cause, is the real test ahead.

9. The Price Tag Fight (Cato Institute, MPA and the Joint Committee on Taxation)

What makes it stand out: Nobody yet knows what this would officially cost, and the estimates that exist are miles apart in tone.

Key data: The Cato Institute estimates the credit could cost between $33 billion and $49 billion over ten years; an MPA-commissioned study claims it could add $125 billion in US production spending and more than 143,000 jobs by 2035.

Why it matters: The bill still needs a score from Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation, and that number will decide how hard it is to pass.

This is where the debate gets serious. The libertarian Cato Institute has argued that film subsidies are among the least efficient ways to create jobs, and its $33 billion to $49 billion range is designed to make lawmakers wince. The MPA’s study pulls the other way, claiming the credit could roughly double American production activity.

Both are advocacy-adjacent, and both rely on assumptions about how studios would behave. The independent number will come from the Joint Committee on Taxation, which hadn’t scored the bill at the time of writing. If that score lands near the top of Cato’s range, expect calls for spending caps or a narrower qualifying test. If it lands lower, the unions’ $4 billion-a-year figure starts to look like a good return. Either way, the EY report’s real job is to shape how that score is read once it arrives.

10. What It Means for Britain (BFI, 2025 Figures)

What makes it stand out: The UK is one of the countries the bill is most clearly aimed at, and it’s just had its best year on record for film.

Key data: BFI statistics show £6.8 billion of UK film and high-end TV production spend in 2025, up 22%, with feature films at a record £2.8 billion, HETV at £4 billion and inward investment at £5.8 billion, or 85% of the total.

Why it matters: If a US credit pulls even a slice of that inward investment home, British crews and studio complexes would feel it first.

Look at that 85% figure again. The bulk of the UK’s production boom is foreign money, overwhelmingly from American studios and streamers, drawn by the 34% Audio-Visual Expenditure Credit, the enhanced 39% rate for visual effects and deep crew bases around Pinewood, Shepperton, Leavesden and Sky Studios Elstree. HBO’s new Harry Potter series is an obvious example, a flagship US production built in Hertfordshire. You can read our guide to HBO’s Harry Potter and what to expect on HBO Max UK.

So should British studios panic? Not yet. A 20% federal credit, even stacked with a state incentive, doesn’t automatically beat the UK’s offer on cost, and the 75% US-shooting rule means a project can’t easily mix the two. Studios also value the UK’s stage capacity, crews and time zone in their own right. But the direction of travel is clear. This comes on top of President Trump’s threat, first made in May 2025 and repeated since, of a 100% tariff on films made outside the US. At the time, Bectu head Philippa Childs warned that the tariff could leave “tens of thousands of skilled freelancers” without work. No tariff has been implemented, but a tax credit is a far more workable tool than a tariff, which is exactly why it matters more to the UK.

11. US States Are Already Fighting Back (California, Georgia and New York)

What makes it stand out: The report covers the past, but the states have already begun changing the present.

Key data: California more than doubled its film and TV tax credit from $330 million to $750 million a year in July 2025, and has since approved credits for 147 productions worth $5.5 billion in economic activity and 21,504 cast and crew jobs.

Why it matters: A federal credit would stack on top of state schemes, which is what could finally make US stages competitive with London’s.

California’s expansion was signed by Governor Gavin Newsom under Assembly Bill 1138. Its April 2026 round alone added 38 film projects, including 20th Century Studios’ The Simpsons Movie 2, and was projected to generate about $800 million in economic activity. That’s real progress, but it’s California competing with Georgia and New York as much as with London.

Georgia shows what a big state credit can do. James Gunn’s Superman was made largely at Trilith Studios near Atlanta and on location in Cleveland. New York is also pulling productions in: Paramount+’s Tulsa King is relocating to New York for Season 5, as we covered in our piece on Tulsa King’s move back to New York. Those intra-US shifts are part of why the unions argue that only a federal credit can tackle foreign competition without states just cannibalising each other.

12. What Happens Next (Congress, Studios and the UK, Late 2026)

What makes it stand out: For the first time, a federal credit has a sitting president’s backing, bipartisan sponsors and a united labour movement at the same moment.

Key data: Entertainment Partners puts 2025 US production spending at $12.15 billion, still the world’s largest but down 20% on 2024; the bill’s backers want it passed in the post-election lame-duck session.

Why it matters: Studio slates for 2027 and 2028 are being planned now, and the location decisions made in the next few months will show whether the bill is already shifting behaviour.

Three things are worth watching. First, the Joint Committee on Taxation score, which will turn this from a cause into a costed policy. Second, whether a year-end tax package actually emerges as a vehicle, or whether the credit slips into 2027. Third, how studios start talking about location in their next round of greenlights. If productions announced for 2027 begin quietly favouring American stages, the bill’s effect will show up before a single dollar is paid out.

For Britain, the useful question isn’t whether the US credit passes but how the UK answers it. The UK has already added an enhanced 39% VFX rate and the 53% Independent Film Tax Credit, both claimable from April 2025. Whether it will need to go further depends on what Washington does next. Hollywood isn’t going to stop shooting in Britain overnight, but a clearer rival offer will change the conversations producers have before they pick a stage.

The Bottom Line

The unions’ report doesn’t reveal anything Hollywood didn’t feel in its bones, but it puts hard numbers on it: a 32-point slide in film spending, a 40-point drop for the biggest blockbusters, and about $4 billion a year in work the US believes it has lost. The question now is whether Congress turns that into a federal credit before the year ends. For UK studios, it’s the most serious challenge to their American business since the tax relief boom began. It won’t empty Leavesden or Pinewood, but it does mean Britain can’t assume Hollywood’s biggest films will keep coming.

Sources: Variety, Deadline, IATSE joint union release, Office of Rep. Laura Friedman, BFI official statistics, Cato Institute.

Frequently Asked Questions

📸 Follow us on Instagram for daily film, TV & gaming news: @filmoriauk