It’s Friday the 13th, so what could possibly go wrong as we dive headlong into musing on the lack of work that seems to be getting worse, its whys, wherefores, and what we might do about it?
A lack of work has been on many people’s minds for quite some time, and over the first few months of the year the lack of work seems to have built into something worse – a significant storm rather than a few waves to ride out. Here, a bit of a drought’s not uncommon at the beginning of any year (if only because the film schools have just thrown their latest crop of graduates out into the world) but it usually settles down. New productions fire up, ongoing and year-round productions (such as Shortland Street) finish their breaks and get back to work, and inbound productions from elsewhere fly in.
The industry gets back to work and crosses fingers that it’s going to be a good year. It was clear early on that 2025 – at least the first half of it – wasn’t going to fulfill that wish.
Some of the causes of that lack of work came from here at home, most notably the continuing effects of the two major networks cutting back on local production in response to the diminishing numbers of eyeballs and advertising dollars being directed at linear broadcast companies.
A big change was the cut to Shortland Street, which has for over 30 years turned out five episodes a week, to a three-times-a-week gig – effectively a 40% cut in the amount of work on offer. Much has been written, including by us, about the huge debt the industry owes the production for training and upskilling generations of cast and crew members over the last three and a third decades.
It’s not just the work that’s dropped off but – as always when it comes to long-running institutions – the realisation that something is no longer too big to fail hits hard, and causes people to have to adjust their worldview.
It’s far too early to assess the longer-term changes that cutting Shortland Street to a three-nights-a-week show will bring, but it’s hard to imagine that any of them will be positive (other than bringing TVNZ’s books closer to balancing).
At ShowNews, we see the lack of work in a smaller than usual number of items in our Production Listings and Crew Callouts (top right of the homepage if viewed on a desktop) and also in a larger than usual number of visits those pages receive.
We also, of course, saw plenty of evidence of lack of work in the snapshot our recent survey took, the results of which you can watch here.
Elsewhere
As far as the international part of the industry is concerned, the inbound productions and opportunities elsewhere for some of our industry’s more established players, those elements continued to get kicked by what feels like a new normal. After covid, strikes, LA’s wildfires and the whims of the US President, confidence isn’t high in the screen industry. From the US, it’s probably very hard to believe that this is a great time to be taking production work offshore.
As much as we see challenges here, the US studios are also struggling, trying to adjust to fragmenting viewership for their TV arms. Five years ago, they were merging like rabbits, keen to build media monsters who delivered everything everywhere all at once. This year, they’re busy trying to saw off their linear TV divisions like gangrenous limbs, before the rot spreads to every other bit of their corporate bodies.
Those problems elsewhere become our problems here when they impact the amount of production and post-production work that’s coming to Aotearoa.
Wouldn’t It Be Nice?
If we could solve those problems. But we can’t. They’re not ours, and they’re not ours to solve. The best we can do, with relation to the US studios, is be ready to deliver when called upon.
Having been to India twice in the last eight months, the NZFC is currently in Europe, looking to support NZ creators, to woo potential partners for NZ productions and bring more work to NZ from other parts of the world.
We can agree or disagree with some of the detail of what’s being done on those trips, but it’s certainly work that needs doing. For whatever reasons, over the last decade NZ’s screen industry has allowed itself to become overly reliant on the US as the source of well-paying work for many crew (with obvious exceptions like writers and directors) that subsidises their ability to work on local productions.
Now, in 2025, that international work has dried up significantly and – even if there was plenty of paid local production work – many people can’t afford to earn only what a local production pays.
Now, post last month’s Budget, it’s clear that there’ll be no real respite from any of these issues in the short term. While there was money announced in the form of confirming another year of the domestic SPR, that year is not this year.
It’s hard to imagine government feeling much love for the industry right now, given the amount of bad press the government in general and ACT in particular drew by announcing a plan to make workers more responsible for their own safety, days ahead of Pike River’s world premiere.
It may have been a world-class example of bad timing, but it does illustrate a point that the screen industry itself is often guilty of ignoring, that an holistic view of a situation leads to more effective decision-making than a blinkered view does.
It seems to us that there are a couple of truisms worth repeating in reaction to all this doom and gloom.
One is that it’s our responsibility to fix something we don’t like, such as the cycle of feast and famine. The other is that a much-used definition of stupidity is to keep doing the same shit and expecting a different outcome.
Sadly, the industry in general seems pretty lousy at addressing the former and very good at repeating the latter.
We’ve written a few times over the last several months that we feel the industry needs to take a bigger-picture view, to present a more unified front that supports the sector as a whole, rather than the vested interests of any particular group within the industry.
We’ve written specifically about the lack of visibility of SINZ, which was set up over a decade ago to be exactly that sort of pan-industry voice. The organisation currently has a website almost exclusively devoted to SIWA – the lack of progress implementing it being a very clear example of vested interests not being put aside for the greater good – and the website offers no contact information for SINZ.
It’s almost like it doesn’t want to be visible, doesn’t want to carry out the role it was set up to take on.
There are a few conflicts of interest lurking in the grass, too. Plenty of people in the industry augment their income with teaching work, usually part-time or as short contracts, in the many tertiary institutions here that offer screen-related courses.
However, the industry needs the number of new entrants these institutions churn out year after year like it needs a hole in the head. Since education became a collection of profit centres, there’s little incentive for educational institutions to downsize the number of students studying any subject, but the industry might perhaps take a stronger public stance against the numbers of people arriving each year with a mortarboard and a mountain of debt. That would at least mean that whatever amount of work is available is more likely to be done by people with experience, and more regular work would be a big step towards making a career in the industry more sustainable.
Many in the local industry will this week have enjoyed, or possibly endured depending on their POV, Dame Julie Christie’s turn on 30 with Guyon.
The ‘reality queen’ (she prefers the term ‘unscripted’) made a good case for NZ being more outward-looking, along with the point that unscripted titles can be a form of NZ-created and -owned IP, which is more commonly associated with scripted content.
Christie has long been vocal when it comes to sharing her view of the industry’s potential, but (in its non-screen-industry meaning), a sense of reality underpinned much of what she said. She’s built a very successful career out of practising what she preaches, rather than doing what was expected of her. So, like it or not, she’s right at least some of the time.
Her 2009 John O’Shea Memorial Address, at that year’s SPADA Conference, was a pretty good example of her telling it like she saw it. She identified challenges for the industry and proposed solutions to them.
She has a particular bent towards unscripted content over scripted, but much of what she said about the landscape and the solutions to challenges holds true for many genres of content.
Central to what she said was that the industry needed to behave more like business, and to look to deliver value not just seek handouts.
Dame Julie’s speech to the SPADA Conference was 16 years ago (read the transcript here). Dame Julie’s conversation with Guyon Espiner is less than a week old. It doesn’t speak well of the industry as a whole that much of what she said in 2009 is still true now. But it does go some way to explaining why feast or famine remain the default settings for the industry.
