Hollywood is becoming international, and if you're a writer, filmmaker or tanet anywhere in the world, that's the best news you've heard in years.
For most of the twentieth century, breaking into the industry meant one thing: moving to Los Angeles. The geography was the gatekeeper. You needed to be in the room ā literally ā to have a shot at the room. Pitch meetings, staffing seasons, writers' rooms, networking events. All of it was physically located in one city, on one coast, in one country. If you weren't there, you weren't really in the game.
That is no longer true. And the shift happening right now is one of the most meaningful structural changes in the history of screen storytelling.
Production has gone global ā not as a trend, not as a talking point, but as a permanent reconfiguration of how film and television gets made. Tax incentives, world-class infrastructure, and the streaming revolution have collectively redrawn the map. The UK has transformed into a genuine production powerhouse. Pinewood and Leavesden are booked solid. Wales has become a serious destination. Canada ā Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal ā has cemented its role not just as a shooting location but as a creative hub with real development activity. And South Africa has emerged as perhaps the most exciting story of all: Cape Town is now hosting major international productions year-round, building crews, building talent pipelines, building something durable.
But the really significant shift ā the one that matters most for writers specifically ā is what's happening in television. Because film was always somewhat porous. An independent film could always come from anywhere. Television was different. American TV, especially network and cable, was famously, almost aggressively, insular. Writers' rooms were physical, hierarchical, and almost exclusively Los Angeles-based. You had to climb that ladder in person, rung by rung, for years. The showrunner system ā creatively powerful as it is ā created a bottleneck that filtered out almost everyone who wasn't already embedded in the LA ecosystem.
Streaming has cracked this open. Netflix, Apple, Amazon ā they don't just buy American content. They commission originals in dozens of countries, many of which go on to massive global success. They have established writers' rooms and development infrastructure in London, in Toronto, in Sydney. The model of the single centralized room is giving way to something more distributed, more genuinely international. HBO, Netflix and Apple have all made serious commitments to British productions and British talent. Canada's co-production treaties, built up over decades, now function as real creative partnerships. South Africa's writers are increasingly being brought into international projects shot in the country ā creating knowledge transfer that is building actual, lasting infrastructure.
The practical result for writers is significant. A British writer no longer needs to relocate to staff on a US show ā the show may come to them. A Canadian writer in Toronto now has access to productions that would have been unimaginable without an LA address ten years ago. A South African writer with a strong voice and a compelling sample is now genuinely on the radar of international buyers in a way that simply wasn't true before.
Writers everywhere who are serious about their craft now have a genuine shot. Not a consolation prize. Not a regional footnote. A real, viable path into the rooms that matter.
That's worth paying attention to.
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The only casting websites I know of, require a monthly subscription to submit. Actors access, castingnetworks, backstage. They cast all over the US. Are you NU or SAG AFTRA?
thanks you so much for your help