Film Students Bet on Hollywood Careers as Industry Footprint Shrinks

Layoffs at Netflix, Walt Disney and the Paramount-Skydance-acquired Warner Bros. have not stopped a new cohort of film students from committing to Hollywood careers in Los Angeles.

USC cinema and media studies student Angela Henderson, 22, graduates in December after applying for dozens of Hollywood jobs, and she admits she is "a little freaked out" by what awaits her.

"What if one day, I am one of those people that ends up losing a job?" Henderson said.

Her worry rests on simple arithmetic. "There are hundreds of people in film programs here who all want to have the same jobs and careers," she said.

Hollywood's Los Angeles footprint keeps shrinking. Media consolidation has driven repeated waves of job cuts, productions continue to leave the state, and artificial intelligence and vertical video are reshaping what gets made and who makes it. Still, aspiring actors, screenwriters and directors keep arriving in the city, and none of the students who spoke with the Los Angeles Times said they plan to quit.

What does the downturn change for the talent pipeline?

Miranda Banks, a professor of film, television and media studies at Loyola Marymount University, said the current generation of students has "their eye on the power of human creativity in a way that I'm not sure any of us in other generations have been so attuned to."

Students have a realistic chance, in her view, if they are "savvy and strategic" about where the industry is headed.

"We've had a lot of unprecedented years, a lot of years with strange things that have impacted the industry and made things particularly challenging," Banks said. "That has happened before. It will continue to happen."

Betting on a box office revival

LMU film and TV production major Gianna Jordano, 19, from Huntington Beach, applied to film schools knowing the industry was in a "slump stage." Watching "Primime," "The Odyssey" and "Spider-Man: Brand New Day" in theaters this year changed her outlook.

"This is what we want to do. This is what I want to pursue in the future and be able to achieve," Jordano said. "I feel less nervous now."

She plans to work her way up to directing, even if that means teaching or restaurant work along the way. "The more open-minded you are, and the more willing you are to work, the easier it is to find a job," she said.

Hardening for a brutal entry market

USC freshman screenwriting majors Teddy Abularach and Mitch Linebaugh, both 18, moved to Los Angeles from New York City and Des Moines, respectively. Abularach is blunt about the odds.

"We're just gonna have to work that much harder to get a job. I'm already preparing myself for a brutal postgrad life," Abularach said. "Even if there's a small chance for me to succeed and be able to pay the bills and do something that I love, it's worth it."

Linebaugh worries "everything is just going to become so uniform" as the industry leans on algorithms and audience preferences, but he remains hopeful that writers and executives alike still "want to make good movies too." If screenwriting fails, he will consider graduate school or entertainment law. Abularach said there is no "plan B outside of entertainment."

Hedging with day jobs

UCLA senior Tomas Carrasco, 25, is preparing to shoot his senior capstone film, a surreal horror comedy, on the director's track after starting at Santa Monica College. He now aims at production design. He reads the market clearly: movies are products that must make money, and the industry is turning toward technology over art-centered risk.

"I see the mergers that are happening and all the AI stuff sucks. I don't like it," Carrasco said. "But I still have to come into class every day and do my homework."

He plans to keep working at his family's Northridge cafe, Mate Conmigo, while pursuing creative work. "I do want it as a career path, and I don't want to be naive," he said. "But you have to kind of be naive. You have to be delusional about wanting to have a career in the arts."

For studios and streaming platforms competing for entry-level talent, the message from this cohort is patience plus flexibility. Henderson, raised in Eagle Rock by two musician parents and a former child actor who transferred from UC Berkeley, said her generation wants to stop Hollywood from recycling "the same material over and over again," and she sees an opening in the current indie revival: "It does feel like we're on the verge of something new. There's a breakthrough that's about to happen."