Los Angeles On-Location Filming Falls In 2022; TV Pilots Plummet By 71.9% As Film & TV Production Drops, FilmLA Says

18.01.2023 - 23:07 / deadline.com

On-location filming in Los Angeles fell by 2.4% in 2022 compared to the prior year, with feature film and television shoot days down 9.6%, TV pilots plummeting 71.9% and commercial shoot days falling 22.6%, according to the latest report from FilmLA, the city and county film permit office.

Last year had been shaping up to be a good one for local filming, but production fell off sharply in the third quarter and again in the fourth – down 19.5% compared to Q4 2021. Even so, on-location shoot-days continue to hold steady at not-so-great pre-pandemic levels.

“The return of pre-pandemic filming levels places us roughly where we were in 2019, which was itself a year of significant production decline,” said FilmLA president Paul Audley. “Can we hold here, or will the pre-Covid downtrend resume? That is the question everyone is asking.”

The only bright spots in the report were for TV reality shows, which were up 5.2%, and the category of “Other,” which was up 22.9%. If not for the shoot-day increase in the “Other” category, which accounts for over a third of all on-location shoot days on such things as still photography, student films, documentaries, music and industrial videos and miscellaneous permitted events – and which employ far fewer workers than do film and TV productions – the year-to-year decline would have been much steeper.

Total on-location shoot days for the year were 36,792, which was down from 37,709 in 2021. FilmLA defines a shoot day as one crew’s permission to film at one or more defined locations during all or part of any given 24-hour period. FilmLA data does not include production that occurs on certified sound stages or on-location in jurisdictions it doesn’t serve.

Fourth-quarter figures show that