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Hungarian Edition
Disney, Paramount and Netflix are pumping billions back into content, but much of that cash is bypassing traditional Hollywood soundstages. As studios pivot toward sports and international originals, Hungary — with Budapest as its production powerhouse — is emerging as one of the global hubs best positioned to convert this “content mirage” into real work on the ground.
When David Ellison told Wall Street, “We need to increase our investments, obviously, in content,” he was speaking to anxious Hollywood investors. But he could just as easily have been speaking to line producers in Budapest.
Under Ellison’s new regime, Paramount is set to boost its content spend by about $1.5 billion next year. Days later, Disney followed with its own headline: an extra $1 billion flowing into its pipeline in fiscal 2026, taking total content spend to around $24 billion. Netflix, which never really got off the gas, has already called out a roughly $1.6 billion jump in 2025, taking it to about $18 billion in annual content costs.
On paper, the “winter” after peak TV and the 2023 strikes looks like it might finally be thawing.
The cautionary note — as laid out in The Hollywood Reporter’s analysis — is that these big numbers don’t mean a simple rewinding of the clock to 2019. The new spending is more targeted, more global and in some cases not even about production at all.
The content mirage in L.A.
The past couple of years have been rough on Hollywood volume. After the writers’ and actors’ strikes in 2023 froze much of the pipeline, every major studio pulled back. FX chief John Landgraf publicly declared the end of “peak TV,” noting that the drop in scripted series had already started before the strikes, which only accelerated the decline.
A Wall Street breakdown from MoffettNathanson captured the plateau: Amazon and Apple basically flat year-over-year on content spend, Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery holding roughly steady into 2025, and Paramount actually down about 7 percent during its sale process. NBCUniversal was trimming, too. Only Netflix was meaningfully up.
Ellison’s spending ramp, along with Disney’s 2026 bump, looks like a reversal of that trend. Netflix CFO Spencer Neumann fanned the optimism further, telling investors, “We’re not anywhere near a ceiling.”
But as Bank of America analyst Jessica Reif Ehrlich warned of Paramount’s turnaround, “There are no easy fixes and a turnaround such as this will take a significant amount of time, require substantial investment and investor patience.”
Translation for the production world: this isn’t a return to carte blanche greenlights for mid-budget cable dramas shooting on the backlot.
Sports first, franchises second
A huge chunk of the new money isn’t headed to soundstages at all — it’s going straight into sports rights. The new NBA deals with NBCUniversal, Amazon and ESPN come in at a staggering $76 billion. Paramount just signed a $7.7 billion deal for the UFC. These are balance sheet-changing commitments, and they live on the same P&L lines as scripted spend.
Then there’s the arms race to lock in elite creative talent and franchise engines. NBCUniversal’s big swing for Taylor Sheridan, and the long-tail deals with the Stranger Things’ Duffer brothers and South Park’s Trey Parker and Matt Stone, are all about protecting a smaller number of extremely valuable “universes,” not funding broad, experimental slates.
None of that is great news if you’re a development exec hoping to revive a 60-series slate of edgy half-hours. But if you’re sitting in Budapest, running a studio backlot or a service company, the global pivot buried in those same earnings calls is where things get very interesting.
“Global, not just domestic”
The language from studio brass is remarkably aligned. “Our content investment is going to be global, not just domestic,” Shell told Wall Street analysts. Disney CFO Hugh Johnston echoed that line of thinking, saying the company will “continue to invest at a reasonable level in content, leaning a bit more towards the international side as we identify opportunities in specific markets to grow the international business where we have a big opportunity.”
They’re all chasing the same equation: if you want to be a global player, you need global content — not just U.S. shows dubbed into 20 languages.
Netflix has already proven the model. The megahit Squid Game and more recent international titles like Adolescence didn’t come out of Burbank; they came out of regional markets with strong crews, competitive costs and infrastructure that could absorb streamer-level expectations.
That’s exactly the lane where Hungary has quietly been playing for years.
Why Budapest is in the sweet spot
From an L.A. perspective, Budapest has long been the place you go when you need “Europe” on screen — Gothic streets, grand government buildings, modern glass-and-steel, all within a production radius that works. What’s changed in this new spending cycle is how central those global hubs are becoming to studios’ actual growth strategy.
If Disney and Paramount are serious about leaning into international content, they need:
- Cost-efficient, high-capacity service hubs that can handle multiple series and features concurrently.
- Experienced below-the-line talent already versed in U.S. studio workflows.
- Predictable tax incentives and permitting that let the finance models pencil out under Wall Street scrutiny.
Hungary checks every box. Its long-established tax rebate system, deep bench of English-speaking crews, and a decade-plus of working with Hollywood and streamer clients put it in the “ready on day one” category. As studios rebalance their slates with more international originals and Europe-based genre and franchise-adjacent projects, Budapest is increasingly competitive not just with other CEE hubs, but with classic Western European locations on both budget and reliability.
In a world where the top line in investor decks says “global content growth,” the question on the inside is: where can we actually shoot this stuff at scale?
Budapest is already one of those answers — and this next wave of spending gives Hungarian producers and facilities a chance to move from “one of” to “go-to.”
The risk: too much sports, not enough scripted
There is a caveat. If sports rights continue to eat such a huge share of studio and streamer budgets, the overall pie for scripted content could still shrink even as headline “content spend” numbers go up. That’s the “content spend mirage” THR calls out: balance sheets look fat, but less of that cash is funding series and films.
For Hungary, that makes the next few years a positioning game.
- If sports and live events dominate, there’s still room for sports-adjacent storytelling: docuseries, character-driven limited series around leagues and fighters, and shoulder programming that can be shot globally.
- If the studios truly commit to building out international scripted as their growth engine, Budapest can anchor not just one-off features, but multi-season series and franchise branches that reliably return year after year.
Either way, the markets that stand to win are the ones that can pitch themselves as turnkey international solutions when L.A. needs to stretch every production dollar.
Why this matters for Hungary now
For Hollywood, the renewed content spend is a mixed blessing — a rush of fresh capital that doesn’t necessarily bring back the old employment base or shooting volume in California. For Hungary, it’s an inflection point.
If the industry’s future really is “global, not just domestic,” then the studios’ next phase will be built on a network of hubs: London, Vancouver, Atlanta, and yes, Budapest. The job for Hungarian studios, producers and policymakers now is to make sure that when Disney’s and Paramount’s international execs look at the map, Budapest isn’t just a line item — it’s the first call.
In other words: while Hollywood debates whether this new spending is a mirage, Budapest has an opening to turn it into bricks, stages and jobs.
