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A coalition of Hollywood unions issued a report on Monday warning that the U.S. has lost significant market share in film and TV production over the last 25 years.
The report found that studios spent 74% of their film
production budgets in the U.S. 25 years ago, but that the figure has since declined to 42%. On the TV side, the figure has fallen from 94% to 64%.
The unions — including IATSE, the Directors Guild of America and SAG-AFTRA — published the report as Congress is considering whether to offer a 20%-30% production incentive to revive the domestic film and TV industry. Supporters have argued that the U.S. needs to counter generous incentives offered by Canada, the U.K., and other countries, and that state-based subsidies are inadequate.
Members of Congress have focused on the sharp downturn in domestic production jobs since the end of Peak TV in 2022. But the union report, prepared by EY, takes a longer-term view, showing that the globalization of production has been underway since the turn of the millennium.
The report acknowledges that production has grown considerably over that period — so the U.S. is taking a smaller piece of a much larger pie.
The study looks only at films with budgets of $5 million or more, in 2025 dollars, and TV episodes costing at least $1 million, for those 40 minutes or shorter, and at least $1.7 million for episodes longer than 40 minutes.
In film, the report found that overall production spending by major studios rose from $3 billion to $7 billion annually in the last 25 years. And in TV, spending exploded from $933 million to $8.4 billion over the same span. The report acknowledges that the TV landscape has changed so dramatically over the past two decades that it is hard to draw clear comparisons.
“The rise of streaming fundamentally altered production scale, budgets, season lengths, and release models, creating discontinuities in what constitutes a comparable television series across periods,” the authors wrote.
The report is also limited in that it does not attempt to explain why production has shifted overseas — only to quantify the shift.
The report finds that big-budget films account for much of the exodus. For the 25 most expensive films, the U.S. market share declined from 74% to 34% over the 25-year span. Those 25 films represented a quarter of all films produced by the major studios, but half of the crew and two-thirds of the budgets.
“This highlights that production budgets are heavily concentrated within a small subset of films,” the report notes. “Patterns observed within this group generally reflect the broader analysis trends, albeit with a somewhat larger decline.”
The report argues that if U.S. market share had held constant over the last 25 years, an additional $4 billion would be spent each year on TV and film production in the U.S.
The Motion Picture Association issued its own report last month, arguing that a federal incentive would generate an additional $22 billion in annual domestic production spending by 2035. The MPA report did not attempt to measure the historical trend in market share, but did warn that market share will decline in the future if Congress does not act.
The unions are set to hold a rally with Sen. Adam Schiff and many Democratic members of the California Congressional delegation on Tuesday in Glendale. Schiff and others last month introduced a federal credit that would combine with state-based subsidies to create the world’s most generous incentive regime.
With support from President Trump, who came out in favor of the idea in August, backers are hoping to pass the incentive into law by the end of the year.
