Welcome to “Lollywood” – Why Film Production Is Leaving Los Angeles for London

Industry News

by Johnnie BehiriAugust 27^th, 2026

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The center of gravity in big-budget filmmaking is shifting, and the numbers now back up what crews on both sides of the Atlantic have felt for two years. Los Angeles just recorded its weakest production year outside the pandemic, while London soundstages are booked solid with Marvel, Star Wars, and streaming tentpoles. The London Standard has even coined a name for the phenomenon: “Lollywood.” Here is what is actually driving the shift, and what it means if you work in production.

The raw data first. FilmLA, the permitting office for the City and County of Los Angeles, counted 19,694 on-location shoot days across Greater Los Angeles in 2025, down 16.1% from 23,480 in 2024 and the lowest annual figure recorded outside of 2020. Industry data provider Luminate counted just 83 films and TV series made in LA in 2025, a 24% drop from the year before, and reports that the UK has become the most popular place to make films outside the United States and Canada, with 71 live-action films and series shot there last year. Those figures come from a feature by Laura Martin in The London Standard, which gave the trend its “Lollywood” label, a coinage that will amuse anyone who knows the term has referred to Pakistan’s Lahore-based film industry for decades. The Hollywood Reporter had already called London “the new Hollywood” back in May 2025.

The LA decline is not slowing down

We have been tracking this story quarter by quarter, from the 6.2% drop in Q2 2025 to the 13.2% decline in Q3 2025, and the most recent numbers offer little comfort. FilmLA’s Q2 2026 report logged 4,711 shoot days between April and June, a 12.7% year-over-year decrease that leaves on-location activity roughly 36% below the five-year average for the period.

The category detail matters if you work in LA. Feature films fell nearly 20% to 443 shoot days, with independent productions making up the majority of what remains; the big studio features are simply shooting elsewhere. Television was the one bright spot, up 34.4% quarter-over-quarter to 1,607 shoot days, though still down 28% against the same period last year, dragged by a reality TV segment that fell about 40% year-over-year. Commercials declined roughly 22%. And as our recent look at FilmLA’s Sound Stage Production Report showed, LA stage occupancy has slid from the mid-90s percentile to 62%, even as new stages keep opening.

What London offers instead

Money, mostly, and infrastructure to spend it on. According to the BFI Research and Statistics Unit, £6.5 billion (around $8.8 billion, at roughly $1.36 to the pound) was spent on film and high-end television production in the UK from October 2024 to September 2025. Film London puts inward investment into the capital’s film industry at £10 billion (around $13.6 billion) over the past five years and says approximately 27 film crews are shooting on location in the city on any given day. Per the BFI figures cited by The London Standard, inward investment in filmmaking specifically, mostly from Hollywood, rose 35% to £2.51 billion (around $3.4 billion) last year, funding 58 foreign-backed features made in the UK.

The current London slate reads like a studio release calendar: Sam Mendes’ four-film Beatles project with Harris Dickinson, Paul Mescal, Barry Keoghan, and Joseph Quinn, Greta Gerwig’s Narnia film, Avengers: Doomsday, The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, and Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Tomb Raider series for Amazon. Lucasfilm recently wrapped Star Wars: Starfighter with Ryan Gosling at the new Shinfield complex near Reading, adding to a studio map that already includes Pinewood, Shepperton, Warner Bros. Studios Leavesden, and Sky Studios Elstree, where the Wicked films were primarily shot. Amazon has bought Bray Studios and holds a long-term lease at Shepperton, and after acquiring MGM in 2021 it controls the James Bond franchise outright.

Then there is the incentive math. The net value of UK production tax relief can reach 39.75% under the Independent Film Tax Credit, among the most generous rates anywhere, and the depth of British crews from camera departments to VFX has been a selling point since long before the current boom. As filmmaker Price James told The London Standard, London has long been considered world-class for crews, even if, in his words, the money and the business side still run through Hollywood.

The tariff that never arrived

Political noise has not helped Los Angeles either. In May 2025, US President Donald Trump announced on Truth Social that he would impose a 100% tariff on movies “produced in Foreign Lands,” calling runaway production a national security threat, and he renewed the threat in September 2025. As of today, no such tariff has been implemented, and the administration has never explained how one would even be levied on a film, a product that crosses borders as data rather than freight. For studios planning two years ahead, though, the mere possibility adds another variable to an already unstable equation.

California is not standing still. The state more than doubled its film and TV tax credit program to $750 million per year, made the credits refundable, and raised the per-project rate to as much as 35%; 170 projects have been approved under the revamped program so far, and a third of all LA feature shoot days in Q2 2026 came from incentivized titles. The subsidies are visibly propping up scripted production, but they have not yet reversed the overall slide. Meanwhile, industry consolidation continues to shrink the number of buyers, with Paramount’s $111 billion Warner Bros. merger clearing US approval in June.

None of this means London’s boom is painless. The Standard’s reporting notes that inward-investment blockbusters have pushed up the cost of crews, actors, and stages for homegrown British productions, while some department heads report day rates that plateaued three years ago. A production hub built on foreign tax-credit arbitrage inherits the same fragility that hollowed out Los Angeles in the first place; incentives that attract productions can just as easily redirect them when another government outbids you.

Have you followed the work across the Atlantic, or are you holding out in Los Angeles while the incentives catch up? Don’t hesitate to let us know in the comments below!