The Americans are back shooting films and TV series in Canada, but the knock-on impacts of the dual Hollywood writers and actors strikes and reduced spending by major streamers will be felt north of the border for years to come.
So says the latest annual economic report from the Canadian Media Producers Association, representing local indie producers, which points to a post-pandemic high water mark for Hollywood production activity in Canada reached before last year’s labor disruption in Los Angeles, and which is now fast receding amid a sharp industry slowdown.
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“The numbers released in Profile 2023 today are more of a happy memory, than a reflection of the current state of the sector,” warned CMPA president and CEO Reynolds Mastin in a statement while releasing Profile 2023: An Economic Report on the Screen-based Media Production Industry in Canada, which measured overall Canadian film and TV production for the year to March 31, 2023.
That’s before Hollywood last year had two prolonged industry strikes, first by the Writers Guild of America, and then by SAG-AFTRA. Both labor actions led to sharp drops in film and TV production in Canada and internationally as the major studios and streamers shut down production of their originals.
The CMPA report points to overall foreign location shooting in Canada reaching a record $6.85 billion in the year to March 31, 2023, or 2.3 percent up on the prior year. That came as the major studios and streamers especially played production catch-up coming out of the pandemic to drive content to streaming platforms like Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Disney+ and Apple TV+.
“Critically, numbers in today’s Profile report do not reflect the impact of strikes by American writers and actors last year, nor the significant reduction in commissioning of Canadian productions currently facing the domestic sector,” the CMPA report said in commentary offered as part of its latest industry data.
The impact of the Hollywood labor actions is especially worrying for the Canadian industry as the level of production for domestic film and TV producers shrank in the latest fiscal year measured by the CMPA, while the share of foreign location shooting north of the border by Los Angeles producers rose sharply to a 56 percent national share.
Accounting for the effects of the Hollywood strikes and a slowdown in Canadian content production as local broadcasters pull back on their spending, the CMPA projected that the overall production volume for the upcoming year to March 31, 2024 will fall below 2021 pandemic-era levels.
There’s some silver lining for the Canadian industry. The CMPA report said foreign, mostly American investment in local Canadian film and TV content reached $1 billion in the latest year measured, as U.S. streamers increasingly open headquarters north of the border and look to blunt regulatory moves to impose spending obligations on foreign players.
