Hollywood is burning. Figuratively, for now. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 1 in 4 animators and VFX workers in film and television lost their job between 2022 and 2023. And the 2023 report came out in May, before the full force of the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes hit. Walk into any coffee shop in Burbank and you’ll hear it: there’s not a lot of hope those jobs will ever come back. Meanwhile, the animation industry is booming. It’s expected to more than double its market value over the next 9 years to an estimated $896 billion dollars (TAG and CVL Economics, 2024). So why is employment imploding while business explodes?
Surprisingly, the answer isn’t AI (at least not yet). It’s outsourcing. According to that same animation guild report, 817 animation jobs that would historically be in Burbank were relocated to Vancouver, primarily to chase tax subsidies. When I worked at Nickelodeon, our show had zero US-based animators. Anything after pre-vis was handled by a Bengaluru-based studio. The artists were talented (some of the best I’ve worked with), but they weren’t hired for their artistry. They were hired to deliver twice the output of a Guild animator for less than half the pay.
Bluntly, artists were laid off in the name of short term profit. Studios are dodging our union rates (which are very reasonable), and they have no reason to stop. It may be time we face the reality that our jobs are gone for good.
So what comes next for the thousands of unemployed artists left in Los Angeles? My answer is collectivization. Small teams of creatives pooling their skills and resources to own their own work, distribute it directly, and profit from it in perpetuity.
This isn’t some distant utopia; it’s an immediate market response. For the first time in history, global distribution is available to anyone with an internet connection and a story to tell. The studio system made sense when production and distribution required tens of millions in upfront capital. But that’s no longer true (Chad wrote more on this here).
Consider our model: a character artist, an environment artist, a writer, and a software engineer. The four of us are producing fast, high-quality animated content at a tiny fraction of traditional studio costs. We bootstrapped the whole project for less than the price of a used car. And we’ll own it forever. These layoffs are unfortunate, but we have opportunities never seen before. It's our job to seize these opportunities, and light the industry on fire by our own hand.