Nothing new. When I was in college down in LA I lived in a very small town founded by stunt people. Probably 80% of the people there were in the stunt business. Every few months they were off to another state or country for filming. Hollywood is just for the studio execs now, everyone else flies to whatever country offers the best tax breaks for them to film.
They go to some pretty incredible lengths too, A friend of mine and his dad own a stunt company that works explicitly with semi-trucks. Pretty much every time you see a semi in a stunt in a movie it's either my friend or his dad driving it. They will ship these semi's to foreign countries instead of film locally because the tax incentives are greater than moving entire production companies around the world.
A few days ago I visited the little picturesque town of Hope, British Columbia. While driving down the Main Street, I saw a dozen chainsaw carvings of wildlife. I thought, why does that one look like Rambo? Found out the first movie was filmed there in 1982. The movie took place in the fictional town of Hope, Washington. When the movie begins, you see Sylvester Stallone walking into town under the real “Welcome to Hope” sign that was in the Canadian town at that time.
Almost every time I see a Canadian character actor I guarantee the film or show was shot there. Shows like X-Files, BSG reboot, The Expanse.. all loaded with Canadian actors
Most of the Stargate series were filmed in Canada too. If you pay attention you'll realise the planets they visit all look like Canadian forest, or an old quarry filming location.
Even funnier is when actors and extras re-appear across series. Or the random extra has an unapologetically Canadian accent. Xfiles and SG1 are guilty of this.
Toronto's Roy Thomson Hall is always funny to see. It was Vought HQ in The Boys and UN headquarters in The Expanse while the show runs were overlapping.
I used to have a number of Hollywood studio clients and worked at a studio-adjacent company for a bit.
It's all about the tax incentives.
Georgia started the race by offering very generous (at the time) tax credits to pull production away from LA and NYC. It worked for a while, and Disney filmed most of its blockbusters there for 15 years. But the talent was unwilling to move to Atlanta, so the actual cost savings weren't that great. This meant Georgia had a U-shaped movie distribution: very low-budget straight-to-streaming-back-catalog crap using entirely local cast and crew, or really big budget movies. Very few middle-tier movies shot in Georgia.
Then London decided to get in on the act, and offered a ridiculously generous film tax incentive that applies to almost all film costs, not just the "below the line" costs (those related to actual production expenses, like crew, equipment, etc). The only catch was that the studio had to publicly disclose the movie's budget, but the incentive was so generous that studios were willing to play along. LA survived the initial blow, until the dual writer and actor strikes drew attention to the UK's non-existent labor protections, but Georgia was destroyed by London's incentive because its tax incentive was the only reason for Hollywood to film there (and filming in Georgia is down over 80% from its peak).
So then California decided to make its film incentive competitive again, nearly matching London's film incentive. But the geniuses in the state legislature wanted to spread the love, so the most competitive credit is only available outside of LA. Epic Fail #1. Worse, there's a fixed and relatively low annual cap for the film tax incentive, so only a handful of productions qualify each year. Epic fail #2. As a result, productions that don't qualify for the CA film tax credit generally go to London (for the incentive) or Vancouver (because everything is cheaper there even without incentives).
P.S. I was part of the downturn-related layoffs, so I no longer work in film or anything film-adjacent anymore.
According to this article about 1/3rd as many movies are made in LA since the 90s. They were only making 30% of films in LA in the 90s so your experience still matches with the data but having 2/3rds of the local film production move elsewhere is significant.
The failure of Camelot (1967) caused American filmmakers to shift exterior shots from studio backlots to authentic locations.[4] The film was widely criticized for its cheap look because it was obviously filmed on an architecturally ambiguous set against the chaparral-covered hills of Burbank.[4]
You're conflating three different eras. There was an era where backlot filming was the norm ("classic" movies before roughly the 70s), an era where on location was expected by audiences (pre-CGI), and the modern one we expect now. That's all rough and the reality is more intricate.
This seems inevitable for most industries in the US (car/general manufacturing)
1. City/region becomes a boom-town based on a new high profit-margin industry
2. As that region becomes more wealthy, labor increases in price, thus there is more incentive to seek labor/resources for that industry outside the city/region
3. City/region hollows out of middle-class level jobs for the industry, retains ceremonial labor and executive offices.
Cape cod. In the 1980s the rich people had trouble getting their trash picked up because no one could afford to live within an hour of the wealthiest areas.
Jackson Hole HS alum here. It's been like that since at least the early 2000's. I commuted to school every morning from Alpine WY. I still have part dream part nightmares about it.
in film, it sounds like this is driven by government incentives/disincentives, not labor costs (see anecdotes in this thread about LA-based production crews flying around the world for filming)
It's also labor costs. It's far cheaper to get a crew, rent out space, etc in Eastern Europe, the US South, even the midwest, which is what led to films being made there. Government/tax incentives too of course.
Aging myself here but growing up in a "movie set city" (definitely not LA) in the 90's meant getting rerouted on the way to school because The Wire needed our block again. It's funny to see how the article shows this wasn't just a local annoyance back then, but an early sign of a much bigger, long running shift in where and how Hollywood actually makes movies.
NCIS used to use my English department building at University as their Hospital. Star Fleet Academy in one of the Star Trek movies was the front of my school's library.
Considering how much they did there it wasn't nearly as inconvenient as you would think. The school had a good process in place for controlling the chaos. It's still weird watching the movie and seeing my old library in it.
Shooting in Baltimore for a story that is about Baltimore is different than shooting in a different city as a stand-in for the city in the script though. That's just normal location shooting.
They go to some pretty incredible lengths too, A friend of mine and his dad own a stunt company that works explicitly with semi-trucks. Pretty much every time you see a semi in a stunt in a movie it's either my friend or his dad driving it. They will ship these semi's to foreign countries instead of film locally because the tax incentives are greater than moving entire production companies around the world.