CALIFORNIA BUSINESS MINUTE
Film Employment
02-21-12
Hi, I am Tim Johnson and welcome to the California Business Minute.
Employment in the motion picture and television industry grew by nearly ten
percent in California in 2011.
The industry added 11,700 employees to its rolls as the amount of on-location
filming in the state also increased according to a report by the Los Angeles
County Economic Development Corporation.
Employment may have been up industry-wide, but the larger macro-economic trends
are troubling. Major studios continued to grapple with the digital threats to
its home entertainment business and declining theatrical attendance,
Pure and simple, fewer Americans went to the movies last year. Domestic box
office receipts last year fell by 3.7 percent to $10.2 billion in 2011, while
attendance dropped 4.6 percent to its lowest level since 1995.
On the home entertainment front, Hollywood continued to struggle to prop up
sluggish DVD sales and encourage consumers to buy digital copies of movies and
television shows. Consumer spending on home entertainment was down by 2 percent
in 2011, the seventh consecutive year that spending in the sector dropped.
“Recent attempts by Hollywood to keep people buying movies as they ditch DVD
discs in favor of Internet-connected TVs, smart phones and tablets were slow
in coming and have gotten off to a rocky start,” according to the report.
Additionally, the report identified that UltraViolet, the cloud-based platform
backed by studios, represents an important step in the industry’s attempts to
revitalize home entertainment sales. Yet, they say that the launch of the service
has been marred by reports that it is “confusing and buggy.”
For California, the picture for the film industry was much rosier. Thanks to film
tax credits, the report identifies that the number of permitted production days
increased by 4.2 percent in 2011, but could not match the post-recession bounce
of 14.9 percent the previous year.
I am Tim Johnson and this has been the California Business Minute.
