L.A. Scripted Shoots Plunge 64% in Seven Years — The Real Story Is the Vanishing Mid-Budget Slate

Four data points from Luminate’s ‘Hollywood Exodus 2026’ — locations, budgets, tax credit — reveal a structural reshaping of the U.S. TV industry-

The Los Angeles production ecosystem, long regarded as the beating heart of the global film industry, is showing visible structural cracks.

According to content market research firm Luminate, the number of U.S. scripted live-action TV series filmed in Los Angeles, California fell from 42 in Q1 2019 to 15 in Q1 2026 — a 64% drop over seven years. Over the same period, the $1M–$3M-per-episode tier shrank from 52% of U.S. TV premieres to 34%, while the broader sub-$5M tier fell from 82% to 63%.

The crux is that this mid- and lower-budget tier had been the ‘staple’ of L.A.’s production ecosystem. Relatively long seasons, limited reliance on foreign locations, and rotational production cycling through the same city’s soundstages had together sustained the year-round bookings of studios, crews, and service vendors.

Read together, the four data points presented in Luminate’s ‘Hollywood Exodus 2026’ report point to something more than a simple shoot-location drift: a structural shift in which the collapse of L.A.’s mid-budget base and the concentration of spending into franchise-scale productions are operating in tandem.

Because that mid-budget band was the core asset of L.A.’s content ecosystem, the city’s losses run significantly above the U.S. average during this period of simultaneous content contraction and budget polarization. How far California’s expanded film and TV tax credit, enacted last year, can reverse the trend is the open question shaping industry debate ahead.

1. Locations — L.A. 42 to 15, While New York Climbs from 5 to 11

Luminate’s quarterly tracking shows L.A. logging the steepest decline among the six leading U.S. production hubs. In Q1 2019, L.A. accounted for 42 of 73 top-six titles — 57.5%. By Q1 2026, the city held 15 of 50, or 30%. The headline ‘40% to under 25%’ figure cited in the report is calculated against the broader universe of scripted releases including animation; restrict the view to live-action only and L.A.’s share drop is larger still.

The pattern across other hubs is uneven. New York more than doubled, from 5 to 11 titles. Atlanta held roughly flat (8 to 9). Vancouver collapsed from 10 to 4, hit decisively by The CW’s drastic scaling-back of its original scripted slate — the network had long been the city’s anchor client. The UK and Ireland rose from 3 to 6, while Toronto held at 5.

Taken together, the data does not support a simple narrative of “work redistributed evenly to other cities or overseas.” Some of L.A.’s lost titles did move to New York, the UK, and elsewhere, but a substantial share reflects projects that were halted at the development stage and never made at all — a sign that title counts and employment are contracting in parallel.

2. Budget Polarization — Sub-$5M Titles Down from 82% to 63%

Episodic budget distribution shifted even more dramatically over the same period. In 2019, 52% of U.S. TV premieres fell in the $1M–$3M tier, 30% in the $3M–$5M tier, and 12% in the $5M–$10M tier. The three higher tiers ($10M–$15M, $15M–$20M, $20M+) combined to a single-digit slice.

By 2025, the $1M–$3M tier had shrunk to 34%, $3M–$5M held roughly steady at 29%, while $5M–$10M more than doubled to 27%. The sub-$1M tier shrank to the point of near-invisibility on the chart. The aggregate sub-$5M share fell from approximately 82% in 2019 to about 63% in 2025.

The issue is not simple inflation. The mid- and lower-budget bands have been hollowed out, pushing the portfolio toward both extremes. As $20M-plus franchise and genre productions have multiplied, the experimental and general-purpose dramas that once tested a range of genres and formats in the middle have receded, deepening industry dependence on a handful of megabudgets layered over a base of short-run, one-off projects.

The pattern echoes the 2010s feature-film market, where tentpoles squeezed out mid- and lower-budget films — and as it repeats in TV, the industry’s capacity to spread risk has actually weakened, in Luminate’s reading.

3. Mid-Budget Was L.A.’s Staple

Read together, the two charts explain why L.A. has been hit harder than peers. Titles in the $1M–$5M-per-episode band typically run reasonable season lengths, don’t shift production base often, and accumulate episodes through the same city’s soundstages and infrastructure — a ‘rotational’ production model. This is precisely the band in which L.A. has long supplied steady year-round work to its set, crew, and service vendor base.

The problem is that as budgets have skewed toward large franchises, this mid-budget slate has been first to leave. Bigger per-episode budgets bring more foreign and out-of-state shooting and longer between-season gaps; as the mid- and lower-budget shows that once filled those gaps have thinned out, relatively well-paying studio jobs are both moving outside L.A. and shrinking in absolute volume — a double squeeze.

Often-mentioned substitutes such as vertical drama and other short-form mobile formats fall short of the studio-based mid-budget series on per-episode length, day rate, and employment stability.

Add the shrinking season lengths of streaming series, and even what counts as a single ‘series’ in the data now involves materially fewer shoot days and smaller crews than before. This employment compression — invisible in raw title counts — is what is making the on-the-ground climate in L.A. and other legacy hubs colder than headline figures alone suggest, the report concludes.

4. California’s Tax Credit Allocation — A Dedicated 15% Set-Aside for Relocating Series

Sensing the urgency, California overhauled its film and TV tax credit program to shore up the Hollywood production ecosystem. The annual allocation alone signals the policy priorities. Other TV series (including pilots) take the largest share at 40%, feature films receive 35%, and ‘relocating’ TV series — productions returning from other states or countries — get a separate carve-out of 15%.

Independent films above $10M and at-or-below $10M each receive 5%, extending coverage to the independent sector as well. Most distinctive is the dedicated 15% set-aside earmarked for relocating TV series. The program does not just back new productions — it explicitly carves out a separate budget line aimed at reshoring existing series that had moved out of L.A. to other jurisdictions.

Headlines on the 2025 reform focused on the topline budget increase, but the real industry impact lies in the underlying adjustments. The base tax credit was raised to 35% of qualified expenditures — a step-up of more than 10 percentage points from the previous 20%–25% range. On top of that, TV series relocating into California receive an additional 5% bonus credit.

Per-project caps on eligible expenses were also lifted: $120M for non-independent projects and $20M for independent films, effectively a ceiling structure designed around attracting mid- to large-scale productions. Eligibility was expanded as well — animated series, half-hour TV shows, and ‘large-scale competition shows’ now qualify for the first time, broadening the program’s embrace of formats.

Industry sentiment is not uniformly positive, however. California still lacks a standalone tax credit targeted specifically at post-production expenses. The result is an inability to structurally counter the migration of visual effects (VFX) and other post work to Canada, other U.S. states, and overseas hubs. Luminate concludes that the strengthened incentives alone are unlikely to fully revitalize L.A.’s production base, and that actual effects will likely emerge only gradually over a period of years.

6. Implications for Korea

Korea’s content industry is also facing a parallel set of pressures: a structure tilted toward megabudget productions, alongside the outflow of production jobs abroad. K-content has unquestionably expanded its stage across streaming services, theatrical, and global broadcasters — but the widening gap between top-tier K-dramas, where per-episode budgets have surged, and middle- and lower-tier slates, where both pay and episode counts are shrinking, traces a polarization curve closely resembling what has been observed in L.A. While a handful of top productions absorb scheduling, investment, and marketing resources, the safety net for small- and mid-sized projects and for production crews is weakening fast.

Two takeaways from the California case stand out for Korea.

First, the design separates reshoring as a distinct policy variable by dedicating a separate budget line not just to new productions but to ‘relocating’ titles returning from outside the jurisdiction. The same logic could be applied directly to a domestic Korean reshoring policy aimed at pulling production back to specific metropolitan regions from Seoul and the capital area.

Second, the expansion of eligibility to include animation, half-hour formats, and large-scale competition shows narrows the blind spots that a drama-centric incentive regime leaves behind. The same point applies to domestic operators looking to expand their format portfolios across streaming, cable, and digital platforms.

That said, one limit needs to be stated plainly: incentives cannot redesign employment structures on the industry’s behalf.

Tax support improves the profitability and financial structure of incoming productions, but it does not in itself guarantee employment stability or rotational throughput for production crews. The fact that L.A.’s drama count fell from 42 to 15 in seven years shows that, where the distribution of project budgets and scheduling structures has itself shifted, tax variables alone leave a gap that is hard to fill.

The conversation Korea actually needs to have is not about “what tax-credit rate” but about an industry-level consensus on which budget-band dramas, in which cities and studio clusters, with what episode structure, will keep production economies turning. Put differently, tax credits sit at the final stage of policy design as a complementary tool — the ‘framework setup’ of how to recompose the portfolio across genre, budget band, and region needs to come first.

Source: Luminate Intelligence, ‘Hollywood Exodus 2026’ Special Report