This Jacobin essay is written from inside the union it criticizes. The author is an IATSE member who went to the union’s quadrennial convention with CREW, an insurgent reform caucus. Some 168,000 behind-the-scenes workers are represented there, from stagehands to below-the-line film crews. Many speakers expressed pride in their craft. Nobody talked about working on a good movie — and the reform caucus, for all its fruitful debate about democratic reform, never took up film as an art form either.

The essay’s argument is that the industry’s standard economic framing — offshoring since the 2023 strikes, COVID-era theater collapse, the streaming cliff — is good for assigning blame and useless for saying what anyone is fighting for.

  • Theater attendance is down 26 percent from 2019, a loss the industry now treats as permanent; cable viewership is down 40 percent over the same period
  • 45 percent of US films were shot overseas in 2025, up from 33 percent in 2022
  • Matt Damon has said Netflix executives asked him to restate a film’s plot three or four times in dialogue so viewers looking at their phones could follow along
  • The Paramount–Warner Bros. merger, on hold pending an antitrust trial in March, would expand David Ellison’s power and mean less film and TV gets made at all
  • IATSE’s central demand is a federal production tax credit — which Ellison also supports, since he saves money shooting abroad and would collect on films shot at home
  • California raised its base credit from 20 to 35 percent, with bonuses pushing it to 40

The alternative the author holds up is French. The EU’s Audiovisual Media Services Directive requires cable companies and streamers operating in France to invest 20 percent of French revenue in French film and TV; Netflix complies, and often doubles the budgets of the films it invests in. It also has real costs — Canal+ money gave Vincent Bolloré leverage over art house cinema — but it beats an industry that moves state to state like a traveling medicine show.

The most successful American intervention was never a subsidy. It was the New Deal antitrust suit that produced the Paramount Decree, which broke vertical integration and opened theaters to independent distributors like Roger Corman — who then trained Scorsese, Nicholson, Demme, Coppola, and Cameron on two-week shoots and one day with Vincent Price. The Trump Justice Department terminated the decree in 2020.

The closing point is a coalition argument: if the goal is to bring jobs home, why not ally with unions in other sectors that want aggressive antitrust enforcement? Why not support single-payer health care, when the Wall Street Journal itself reported that British crews cost studios less partly because the UK doesn’t make them carry health insurance? These are not pipe dreams — they are policies that have been tried and worked.