Oh Cala Wood.
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Truesdell Wealth, Inc.
A Registered Investment Advisor 
The Truesdell Professional Building
200 NW 52nd Avenue
Ocala, Florida 34481
352-612-1000 or 
212-433-2525 

If you've ever driven north out of Orlando on Interstate 75, somewhere around the time the suburbs thin out and the land starts to roll, you begin to notice that you've crossed into a different Florida. The flat coastal Florida of postcards is behind you. The Florida in front of you has hills, real hills by Florida standards, with white-board fences running along the ridges and thoroughbreds grazing in pastures that look like somebody airlifted them out of Kentucky. The exits start carrying horse names. The road signs point to the World Equestrian Center, a place so large and so deliberate that it changed the conversation about what Ocala is and what Ocala could become. And out beyond those horse farms, along the commerce corridors, you'll see something else. Warehouses. Big ones. New ones. Steel rising on what used to be pine flats and pasture. The trucks moving in and out tell you that the rest of the world has figured out something the locals have known for a while: this part of Florida is positioned at the intersection of just about everywhere.
Hold that picture in your mind, because we have a question to chew on for the next little while. Could the Ocala metropolitan area, the heart of Florida and the country just north of Orlando, be poised for a film, television, and video production boom? Could the same combination of land, infrastructure, beauty, and cost advantage that's drawn equestrian sport, retirees, distribution centers, and breeders also draw the cameras? I'm not going to tell you yes and I'm not going to tell you no. The honest answer is more interesting than either. But by the time we ride out of this together, you'll have a clearer picture of where the industry is, where Florida is, what Ocala has, and what would have to happen if the forward-thinking minds in this region decided that the next chapter was going to be theirs to write.
Now, before we get to Ocala, we have to take an honest look at where the picture business actually stands. Because if we don't understand what's happening to Hollywood and why, we'll either oversell what's possible here or undersell it. Both are mistakes.
There's a story going around out west that just about tells the whole tale. A television producer was putting together a game show. He had Rob Lowe lined up to host. He had contestants ready to play. And when he set the cost of filming in Los Angeles next to the cost of flying the whole production to Ireland, Ireland won. Not by a nickel either. By enough to make the decision easy. So they packed up Rob Lowe, packed up the contestants, packed up the cameras, and off they went across the Atlantic. That one decision, by one producer, on one show, captures more about the modern entertainment business than a thousand pages of trade press.
For a hundred years, Hollywood was the place. If you wanted to make a picture, you came to Los Angeles. The talent lived there. The crews lived there. The stages were there. The vendors were there. You could walk down a street in Burbank and find every craftsman, every camera operator, every costume designer you needed within a five-mile radius. It was the kind of cluster that took a century to build and nobody figured could ever come apart. Well, friend, it's coming apart.
The numbers tell the story plain enough. Last year, on-location shoot days in the greater Los Angeles area dropped to about nineteen thousand seven hundred. That's a sixteen percent fall from the year before and the lowest count in recent memory if you set aside the pandemic shutdown. The first quarter of last year saw a twenty-two percent drop year over year, with television down better than thirty percent and feature films down nearly twenty-nine. There's been no annual increase since 2021. Early 2026 did show a small bump, about ten percent better quarter over quarter, with features leading the way, but the overall level still sits below where it stood in better years. Soundstages that used to run at near full occupancy are sitting at about sixty-three percent. Tens of thousands of jobs have evaporated. Forty-two thousand in entertainment-related sectors in Los Angeles County alone over a couple of years, with the below-the-line folks taking the worst of it. Those are the grips, the gaffers, the prop masters, the caterers, the people who actually build the magic.
An old rancher I knew used to say that when the water dries up, you find out pretty quick which cattle were grazing for love and which were grazing for grass. Hollywood is finding out which productions were there for the talent and the legacy and which were there because that's just where the trail ended. Turns out a lot of them were the second kind.
So why is this happening? It isn't because the talent moved. It isn't because the audiences disappeared. It's because doing business in California got too expensive to pencil out. Start with labor. Wages are high, benefits are high, payroll burdens run anywhere from twenty-eight to thirty-four percent. Workers' compensation costs are eye-watering. Union work rules add expense at every turn. None of this is to say workers don't deserve fair pay. They do, and they earned it. But when you stack it all up, Los Angeles becomes a number that simply will not compete with the numbers a producer can get in Georgia, New Mexico, New York, or overseas.
Then add the real estate. Housing in Los Angeles is a punchline at this point. The crews who used to live thirty minutes from the studio now live three hours away or have left the state entirely. The vendors are getting squeezed by the same costs. The whole ecosystem that made Hollywood Hollywood is being priced out of Hollywood. Then there's the permitting and the regulation. Layer upon layer of process. Sign here, wait here, pay here, do it again.
Here's where I have to stop and admire the situation for a moment. California, the state that prides itself on being the cultural capital of the world, has spent decades writing rules, taxes, and regulations that make it economically irrational to produce culture inside its own borders. Then it acts surprised when the cameras leave. That takes a certain kind of accomplishment. You almost have to applaud it.
To be fair, the state has finally noticed. Last year they expanded the Film and Television Tax Credit Program to seven hundred and fifty million dollars a year. They call it Program 4.0, which is what folks call something when they've already tried three other versions of it. They raised the base credit to thirty-five percent and stretched it as high as forty-five with bonuses. They made the credits more refundable. They broadened who could qualify. FilmLA says there are early signs of recovery. That's good. That's something. But uncapped programs in other states and overseas still beat what California is offering, and tax credits cannot fix the underlying problem. The underlying problem is that everything else in California is too expensive. Some of the analysts are now warning that parts of the Hollywood ecosystem could end up looking like Detroit looked in the 1980s. Detroit didn't lose the automobile. It lost the assumption that everything had to be built in Detroit. Hollywood is losing the assumption that everything has to be shot in Hollywood. Once that assumption is gone, you don't get it back easily.
That's where Hollywood sits. Now let's swing east, bec...