Another longtime Hollywood production company has shut its doors, becoming the latest casualty of California’s prolonged slowdown in film and television production.
Shadowcast Pictures, a Los Angeles-based production equipment rental company that supplied cameras, lighting and other filmmaking gear to movies, television shows and commercials for nearly two decades, has ceased operations after struggling through years of industry turmoil.
“I couldn’t imagine the film industry that was profitable and had a foolproof system for over 100 years fall off a cliff,” owner Jay Ellison told CBS Los Angeles.
Ellison said the business never fully recovered from the disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and was further battered by the 2023 Hollywood writers’ and actors’ strikes, the ongoing decline in production across Los Angeles and the growing use of artificial intelligence in filmmaking.
“AI is basically replacing the background, the lighting, even the costume, wardrobe, in certain instances,” Ellison said. “It’s all being changed and manipulated by AI.”
Shadowcast Pictures, which was independently owned and operated by Ellison, is the latest production support business to disappear as work continues to migrate out of California. The company specialized in renting production equipment to film, television and commercial shoots rather than producing movies itself.
Its closure adds to a growing list of entertainment businesses that have folded in recent years.
More than 80 film and television production service companies in Los Angeles have closed since 2022, CBS Los Angeles reported. Among them was Faux Prop House, a longtime prop rental company that shut down in 2025 after citing the steep decline in local production.
Entertainment attorney Jonathan Handel warned that the industry’s struggles extend well beyond Hollywood studios, affecting thousands of businesses that depend on film and television work throughout Southern California.
“This is a problem not just for the entertainment industry,” Handel told CBS Los Angeles. “This is a problem for the economy of Los Angeles as a whole. It’s one that needs to be addressed very aggressively by the next mayoral administration and by the next governor.”
California lawmakers have expanded the state’s Film and Television Tax Credit Program in an effort to lure productions back from competing states and overseas, but many industry leaders say the incentives have yet to reverse the exodus.
States including Georgia, New Mexico and New York, along with countries such as Canada and the United Kingdom, continue to attract major productions with competitive tax incentives and established production infrastructure.
“It’s very difficult,” Handel said. “Once business has left and is left for a duration, those other locations build up a reservoir of physical and human capital, of trained crew members. It becomes harder to take the business back than it would have been to prevent it from leaving.”
Federal lawmakers are also weighing proposals for a nationwide production tax incentive that could be combined with existing state credits in an effort to encourage more film and television projects to remain in the United States.
[Notigroup Newsroom in collaboration with other media outlets, with information from the following sources]
