Fade to Black: Hollywood’s AI-Era Jobs Collapse Is Starting
Amazon plans a 75 percent automated workforce. Now full human creativity may soon only exist for a few indie weirdos
I write every other Tuesday for paid subscribers. I explored the seismic impact of OpenAI’s Sora 2 and ChatGPT-5 and interviewed Asteria CEO Bryn Mooser about his studio’s strategy to safeguard IP. Check out The Ankler & my comprehensive coverage of AI & Hollywood here.
Walk through any studio lot right now — Burbank, Culver City, pick your ghost town — and the silence tells the story. Parking spots are suddenly easy to find. Writers’ rooms are half-empty. The spreadsheets that once justified those jobs are now being run by algorithms.
Hollywood has faced a dozen “end times” before — sound, television, streaming — and always survived. But this time is different. This isn’t disruption by a new medium. It’s subtraction by machine.
Media moguls aren’t dreaming of new worlds anymore. They’re dreaming of smaller payrolls.
In just three years, Los Angeles County has lost 41,000 film and TV jobs — a quarter of its entertainment workforce — according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data that Elaine Low analyzed in Series Business this week. “Right now, we’ve just come out of the worst year on record, excluding Covid, for on-location filming,” FilmLA president Paul Audley said this spring. “And as we come to a close on the first quarter of 2025, it looks like this year is doing even worse.”
That collapse doesn’t stop at the studio gates. It’s radiating outward — into marketing firms, PR shops, craft services, freelance editors, and the entire constellation of suppliers that make the business run. Add in 130,000 actors (most of them unemployed) and another 20,000 writers (whose available gigs fell 42 percent from 2023 to 2024), plus lawyers, agents, accountants, financiers, and you’re talking about a million people whose livelihoods depend on traditional film and television — just in Southern California.
Meanwhile, Big Tech is leading our way into an autonomous future. According to documents obtained by The New York Times, Amazon’s long-term plan is to replace roughly 75 percent of its operational workforce with robots and automation. The company already is cutting tens of thousands of human jobs across divisions like Prime Video, Twitch, and Amazon MGM Studios, in what executives describe as a “refocus around AI investment.” Translation: Machines don’t get overtime.
In today’s column, I look ahead to the dystopian future just starting and what you can expect:
Why Hollywood’s biggest layoff wave yet isn’t just cyclical — it’s engineered
How studios no longer own their audiences — Big Tech does
How Wall Street’s “efficiency gospel” invited AI to finish the job
The trillion-dollar logic behind replacing people with code
Amazon’s plan to automate the work of three out of four human workers, and what that signals for studios
The ripple effect across agencies, marketing and suppliers now fighting extinction and in other production hub cities like Atlanta and Vancouver
What government could do to slow the collapse — and why it probably won’t
The human and cultural cost hiding behind phrases like “strategic realignment”