(Bloomberg) -- Filming in Los Angeles tumbled 12% last quarter, pulled down by plunging production of reality TV shows, showing the Hollywood economy has yet to recover from industry cutbacks and two crippling strikes.
Production of reality TV shows slumped 57% from a year earlier, the local permit group FilmLA said in a statement Wednesday. That drop led the overall decline in work, measured in shooting days.
Data from the organization shows output significantly below 2021 levels, just before studios began cutting production and firing staff under pressure from investors to show a profit in streaming. Workers in the Los Angeles entertainment industry had hoped business would quickly ramp up after the studios reached new long-term labor deals with striking writers and actors last year.
The falling numbers paint a worrisome picture for the industry and its workers. The region’s greater entertainment industry workforce shrank by 16% last year, according to the Otis College Report on the Creative Economy issued in June.
Some areas of production showed growth. Work on comedies more than doubled from a year ago, FilmLA said, while TV dramas almost rose that much. Feature film shoots were down 3.3%.
But overall, production measured in shooting days was down 55% from the recent peak three years ago.
Contract talks between the studios and another major union, the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, may have contributed to the decline. They announced a new long-term agreement in late June.
While production is down, developers continue to construct new sound stages in Los Angeles. On Tuesday, East End Studios, joined by city officials, broke ground on a 245,000-square-foot project estimated to cost about $230 million in downtown LA’s Arts District. It’s expected to open in late 2025.
The greater LA area has 7.3 million square feet of space and sound stages, by far the biggest entertainment center in North America, with more than 4 million additional square feet under construction or planning, according to CBRE Group Inc., which raised funds for the downtown project.
--With assistance from John Gittelsohn.
(Updates with labor agreement in seventh paragraph.)
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