It's happening to Hollywood right now. In the past three years, since roughly 2022, the majority of IATSE folks (film crew, grips, etc.) have seen their jobs disappear to Eastern Europe where the labor costs one tenth of what it does here. And there are no rules for maximum number of consecutive hours worked.
How do? Perhaps if you film in Eastern Europe (which I realize does happen a bit), but even if your crew is foreign, if you’re filming in the US they’re still subject to US labor law. Being willing to ignore labor law also happens but is a bit beyond “offshoring”.
The film production company flies the cast of actors out to Serbia or whatever and relies on Serbian crews.
Prior to 2022 they'd fly out the entire crew from the US and all the workers would be American and Canadian. Union, highly paid. Now they're using local (non-American) labor.
Amazon and Apple taught the foreign talent how to do grip work so they didn't have to hire expensive American workers anymore.
There are far fewer productions happening domestically within the US now. The numbers are 30% of what they once were.
