Another Sobering Snapshot of Hollywood’s Production Decline -

A Luminate report finds the total number of TV episodes produced in 2024 fell by nearly 5,000 compared to just two years earlier as streaming and broadcast networks curb spending.

In a bit of positive news for those following film and TV production trendlines, Netflix executives said on Tuesday that they’re planning to up their annual cash content spend by about $1 billion this year — from $17 billion to $18 billion — as the streaming giant broke records with 19 million quarterly subscriber adds for a total of 302 million global members.

But, increasingly, Netflix is an anomaly in the Hollywood ecosystem, where the divide between the haves and have-nots has been growing since the Peak TV era ended in 2022. And new research finds that, when tallying up all the episodes produced last year, that figure is far lower than it had been just two years ago, before the spending pullback and the dual writers and actors strikes in 2023.

Some 16,012 total episodes of TV content were produced in 2022, a figure that dropped to 13,300 episodes in 2023 and 11,069 last year, according to a new report from data provider Luminate, which is co-owned by Penske Media Corporation, the parent of The Hollywood Reporter. If looking at total hours of TV produced, that figure falls from 14,958 hours in 2022 to 10,405 last year.

Among streaming platforms, most of those tracked in the Luminate report saw fewer U.S.-produced TV premieres in 2024 than a year earlier. The exceptions were, of course, Netflix, which saw 146 premieres last year compared to 140 in 2023; Peacock, which upped its premieres from 25 to 36 last year; and Prime Video (39 in 2023 to 42 in 2024). Notably, Disney+ — as forecast by CEO Bob Iger — slimmed down its original offerings last year as premieres fell from 25 in 2023 to just nine in ’24 as Disney pushed a larger bundle with Hulu and ESPN+.

Meanwhile, as studios have pulled back from flooding the zone on streaming releases — in favor of trying to build scale through targeted bundles (like pairing Max with Disney+ and Hulu) — there was a slight uptick in the amount of theatrical product that hit the big screen last year. And that’s despite the 2023 strikes delaying some tentpoles from 2024 to 2025. About 121 releases from major studios were sent to theaters in 2024, an uptick from 113 a year earlier.

While studios sent more features to streaming, the number of streaming-only film debuts fell last year. About 296 movies from major streamers bowed in 2023, last year that figure fell to 264.

The snapshot from Luminate gives a wider lens view from the quarterly updates that permitting office FilmLA has been giving of the Los Angeles County production landscape. Overall shoot days in L.A. — across film, television and commercials — fell from 36,792 in 2022 to 23,480 in 2024. And across the United States, per the latest ProdPro tally in October, production volume dropped 35 percent in the third quarter of last year as compared to 2022.