Hollywood will own the Oscars red carpet Sunday night, but “The Town” won’t own the movies being honored with the evening’s biggest prize. Not one of this year’s 10 Best Picture nominees was primarily made on a Hollywood soundstage or studio lot—a striking snapshot of how far the industry’s center of gravity has shifted from its historic home.
This year’s Best Picture lineup reads like a map of Hollywood’s dispersal: Marty Supreme was shot on New York streets, Sinners in Louisiana, Hamnet in the U.K., with other contenders anchored in Canada, Europe, and South America. The Dolby Theatre will still be the global showcase on Sunday, but the location spending, local payrolls, and tax revenues tied to the movies themselves are no longer in the greater Los Angeles area.
For decades, if you wanted to build a career in film, the default answer was simple: You got yourself to Los Angeles. There, a dense ecosystem of soundstages, backlots, labs, rental houses, unions, and guilds created what economists call a virtuous circle. Projects attracted talent, talent attracted more projects, and the whole thing fed on itself. This year’s Oscars underscore how much of that activity has migrated to alternative hubs that can offer the one thing Hollywood doesn’t offer: lower costs.
A de-rating in real time
For the thousands of workers who make Hollywood the dream factory it’s known as around the world, the numbers are brutal. Production measured in Los Angeles shoot days is plunging, down from 36,792 in 2022 to just 19,694 in 2025, according to FilmLA research.
Around 41,000 workers exited the region’s film and TV workforce between 2022 and 2024—some voluntarily, many not. The industry that once guaranteed steady work for writers, grips, editors, costumers, and craftspeople—as well as the actors, directors, and other celebrities who will walk the red carpet tonight—is fraying, and with it the informal apprenticeship system that trained the next generation. A show that once would have shot on a Burbank soundstage now quietly decamps to Atlanta, Dublin, or Budapest.
When the dream factory unbundles
The Harvard Business School’s Michael Porter famously cited Hollywood as one of the world’s great industry clusters, alongside Silicon Valley. The value of such clusters isn’t just the hard infrastructure; it’s the constant collisions of people and ideas in one place. When productions scatter, those collisions become rarer.
Great films will still be made, and some will still win Oscars. But they are less likely to emerge from Los Angeles—and more likely to be the product of a distributed, cost-optimized network that treats Hollywood as a logo, not a location.
Meanwhile, the strategic response from legacy studios has tilted toward mergers, asset sales, and “synergies” rather than new investment in Hollywood itself. That may please investors, but it does little to rebuild the local production base that made the town an economic powerhouse. When the key lever is cutting costs instead of greenlighting more work, the cluster’s flywheel spins in reverse.
The dream factory hasn’t vanished. It has been unbundled—and Hollywood is learning what it feels like when the world’s most famous cluster starts to come apart. On Sunday, the Oscars will sell the fantasy that the town at the center of the show is also the center of the business. The Best Picture slate says otherwise.
For more on the decline of Hollywood’s industry cluster, read Geoff Colvin’s feature explaining how it happened.
