​​​​FilmL.A. Inc. announced that production activity in Los Angeles set a new record in the fourth quarter of 2021.
The Hollywood-based partner film office for the city and county of Los Angeles released a new report recording 10,780 shoot days between October and December of 2021, 4% higher than the previous three-month high of 10,359 shoot days set in the fourth quarter of 2018.

Overall, however, film production was down for the year: In comparison to the pre-Covid average for the years of 2016 to 2019, 2021’s shoot days were down by 1.6%. Shoot days for the region added up to 37,709, lower than the previous peak of 39,627 in 2016.

Paul Audley, FilmLA’s president, attributed the disparity between the quarterly increase and annual decrease to a rebound of production due to delays earlier in the year.

“To produce the amount of content they need to keep all of their various distribution networks going, they were really ramping up production and doing a lot of work coming into the end of the year,” Audley told the Business Journal.
He also suggested that due to the omicron variant it’s possible that production may progress similarly in the first quarter of 2022, starting off slow and then picking up speed.

In particular, Audley said that television was a big driver of production, growing 18% over pre-Covid years, resulting in almost half of all Los Angeles-based production in 2021.

“TV drama in particular was great, and the other place which had sort of tanked in recent years was reality TV, which came back at about 130% above normal,” he said.
The reason for this difference between TV and film productions, he explained, was because film production requires more personnel and more logistical considerations, whereas TV — and in particular, reality series — can be produced on a shorter time frame with a smaller cast and crew.

Estimating that production in January is occurring at about 40% of normal shooting days — “normal” being pre-Covid numbers — Audley said that film production will likely continue to struggle while smaller, seasonal productions, including for commercials, will likely dominate the L.A. production landscape.

“There’s a lot of pent-up content waiting to be produced and a lot of need for that content, so I think we’re going to see a great deal of production return.”

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