Hollywood,Vancouver,and the World: Employment Relocation and the Emergence of Satellite Production Centers in the Motion-Picture Industry

The paper opens with an identification of the phenomenon of employment relocation (runaway production) from Hollywood and the concomitant formation of satellite production centers in other parts of the world. A brief theoretical analysis of this issue is provided, emphasizing the role of scale effects and transactions costs. The empirical record of the decentralization of film-shooting activities from Hollywood over the period from the early 1980s to the early 2000s is reviewed. We describe the effects of these activities on the rise and consolidation of the Vancouver film-production complex, and we engage in a broad discussion of the spatial and economic structure of the complex. We subsequently show that many places in other countries (for example, Australia, New Zealand, Romania, the Czech Republic, Mexico, South Africa, and elsewhere) are now competing strongly with Vancouver for film-shooting activities from Hollywood. We predict that this competition is likely to intensify greatly over the next decade or so, and that the global geography of film-shooting activities will almost certainly become increasingly more variegated as new studio complexes open up around the world.