Fallout Director Reveals California’s High-Stakes Plan to Stop Texas From Becoming Hollywood 2.0
Wildfires ripped through California, derailing shoots across Hollywood, and the team behind Prime Video’s Fallout rallied to help crew who lost their homes — the latest hit in a year when fires, strikes, and soaring tax incentives are pushing productions to rethink where and how they work.
California has been through it lately, and Hollywood felt every bit of it. Between wildfires, strikes, and rising costs, productions scattered. One crew that held together through the mess: Prime Video's Fallout team, who rallied to support several crew members after the fires took their homes. And yet, even with everything pushing shows out of town, director Jonathan Nolan wants to keep making things in Los Angeles.
Nolan on staying in LA
Nolan told Deadline he is betting on California to get its groove back if the incentive math improves.
"Hopefully now with a revised and revamped tax credit program, we’re gonna be competitive again and we’re gonna see more and more production coming back to LA. So, we won’t be alone shooting the end of the world here."
Translation: the last few years have pushed productions away, thanks to a perfect storm of a non-competitive tax credit setup, higher costs across the board, and the kind of disruptions (pandemic, the dual strikes in 2023, and this year’s catastrophic wildfires) that make planning nearly impossible. LA is still the creative hub, but the economics haven’t been playing nice.
Meanwhile, Texas is rolling out the welcome mat
While LA tries to recalibrate, a lot of filmmakers are looking elsewhere. Texas has turned into a legit hotspot, with a growing group of actors and producers trying to build a new power base there.
The most aggressive mover is Taylor Sheridan, the Yellowstone architect, who is planting roots in the Fort Worth area. He’s opening a 450,000-square-foot production campus loaded with soundstages and production suites, designed to handle multiple big builds at once. Paramount+'s Landman has already shot there, which gives you a sense of how fast this thing is coming online.
Why the shift? A simple equation: Texas offers a friendlier cost of doing business, including no state income tax and film incentives that, at the moment, are more attractive than what many productions can wring out of California. The state is also enjoying a broader economic bump from the attention, from tourism to media jobs, as the narrative of it being the next big production center keeps spreading.
How we got here (and what might be next)
Hollywood has been knocked sideways more than once in the last few years. First the pandemic, then the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes, and now a wildfire season that took lives and destroyed thousands of homes. Add LA’s cost of living, and it’s not shocking that crews and shows are voting with their feet. You can’t run a set if every line item feels like a luxury purchase.
Will a revamped California tax credit fix it? Maybe. If the numbers pencil out, Nolan’s vision of a busier Los Angeles could happen. But Texas isn’t waiting around, and the momentum there is very real. Expect more productions to test the waters, and expect the ripple effects to show up on screen and on the local economy over the next few years.
- Fallout (Prime Video) — Showrunners: Graham Wagner and Geneva Robertson-Dworet; Premiered April 10, 2024 and currently airing; Rotten Tomatoes: 93%.
Curious where you want the industry to land? Keep LA as the mothership, or let Texas take a real shot at the crown?