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Producers and directors

Also called Film director, TV producer, Television producer, Executive producer, Showrunner

In brief

In May 2025, BLS counted 143,120 US producers and directors, with median pay of $90,360 a year. Of the BLS counts since 2003, the highest was 154,470, in May 2023. The earliest figure here is an estimate of 160 from 1940, not measured the same way as today's count. The last full technology era for producers and directors: Streaming production pipeline, 2012 to 2022.

What the sources say

Official outlook

BLS projects employment to grow 4% from 2025 to 2035.

BLS Employment Projections 2025-35

AI exposure studies

Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. BLS publishes these counts as yearly survey snapshots and cautions against reading them as a precise trend. In May 2021 BLS changed how it estimates these counts (a model-based method using three years of survey data) and moved fully to the 2018 occupation codes, so part of a change across 2021 can come from the method rather than the work.

Last updated .

Cite this page
APA

Future History. (2026, October 11). Producers and directors: jobs and pay since 1937 [Data set; data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35]. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/27-2012

Chicago

Future History. "Producers and directors: jobs and pay since 1937." Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. Last modified October 11, 2026. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/27-2012.

BibTeX

@misc{futurehistory_27_2012, author = {{Future History}}, title = {Producers and directors: jobs and pay since 1937}, year = {2026}, month = oct, howpublished = {\url{https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/27-2012}}, note = {Last updated 2026-10-11. Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35}, }

The access date is today's date on your device.

drag to travel through time
19001925195019752000now
2026
Known then as Film Operator / Camera Operator (pre-narrative cinema era)
Known then as Director-Cameraman (early studio era, single-person creative-technical role)
Known then as Film Director / Studio Director / Producer-Director (Ince-system era)
Known then as Film Director / Motion Picture Director (Screen Directors Guild era)
Known then as Director / TV Director / Producer (post-DGA merger, broadcast television expansion)
Known then as Director / Producer / Executive Producer (cable and independent film era)
Known then as Producers and Directors (BLS SOC 27-2012, streaming and digital era)
Known today as Producers and Directors (BLS SOC 27-2012, streaming and digital era)
Projected to still be called Producers and Directors (BLS SOC 27-2012, streaming and digital era)
Data from the May 2025 survey
US Employment
143K
Est.

Stated in source: BLS OEWS

Official statistic
Report an error
Median Annual Wage
$90,360
Est.

≈ $88,043 in 2024 prices (derived by us, CPI-adjusted)

Official statistic
Report an error
Beat · 1908

D. W. Griffith joins Biograph Studios as a director and over the next five years produces over 450 short films, inventing or systematizing the close-up, the cross-cut, the point-of-view shot, and the parallel narrative: essentially the entire visual grammar of cinema. Griffith's 1915 feature The Birth of a Nation (three hours long, $100,000 budget, the most expensive American film to that point) demonstrated that film could sustain feature-length dramatic narratives. The director as a creative author, not merely a technical supervisor, is Griffith's legacy.

Beat · 1914

Thomas Harper Ince at Inceville Studios develops what becomes the standard Hollywood production model: he stops directing individual films himself and instead writes and approves detailed continuity scripts, then delegates execution to staff directors including Francis Ford, John Ford, and Jack Conway. Ince is the first person to exercise producer authority over creative content as a distinct role from the director who shoots it. The producer-director separation that defines the modern industry is Ince's institutional invention.

Beat · 1936

On January 13, 1936, articles of incorporation are filed for the Screen Directors Guild (SDG) with 29 charter members, King Vidor as president. The announcement the following day triggers over 100 additional membership applications within 48 hours. The SDG's founding codifies the director as a labor category distinct from actor, writer, and studio executive, with economic rights and creative protections that could be negotiated collectively. The 1936 founding is the formal birth of the director as a recognized occupational category in the US labor economy.

Beat · 1948

The US Supreme Court rules in United States v. Paramount Pictures that the major studios' ownership of both production and exhibition (movie theaters) constitutes an illegal monopoly under antitrust law. The studios are forced to divest their theater chains. The ruling ends the integrated studio system that had structured Hollywood since the 1920s and opens the door to the freelance director economy: by the early 1950s, most directors were no longer under long-term studio contract but were instead hired picture-by-picture. Weekly film attendance, which had peaked at 90 million in 1946, falls to 40 million by 1960 as television competes for leisure time.

Beat · 1960

The Screen Directors Guild (1,212 members) merges with the Radio and Television Directors Guild (856 members) on January 1, 1960, to form the Directors Guild of America with 2,068 combined members. The merger is explicitly a response to the television boom: the RTDG was founded in 1947 specifically because television had created a large new class of directors who needed collective bargaining representation. The DGA at founding represents directors, assistant directors, unit production managers, associate directors, stage managers, and production assistants across film and television.

Beat · 2023

The Writers Guild of America strikes from May to September 2023 (148 days) and SAG-AFTRA strikes from July to November 2023 (118 days) in the first double strike by both unions since 1960. The central demand: limits on the use of AI to replace writers' scripts and actors' performances, plus improved streaming residuals. Both unions win contract provisions establishing consent-and-compensation requirements for AI use of member voices and likenesses (SAG-AFTRA) and prohibiting studios from using AI-generated material to diminish writer compensation or credits (WGA). The 2023 strikes are the creative workforce's most direct assertion that AI tools will be governed by labor contracts, not decided unilaterally by studios. The strikes directly affected Producers and Directors: most productions shut down for months, creating a visible production gap in the 2024-2025 release calendar.

How to read this number

OEWS is a point-in-time survey snapshot, not a continuous time series; BLS advises against using it for year-over-year trend comparison.

Each dot is a cited figure over time; the dotted line only links them (values between aren't measured). Hollow dots are estimates.

Official statistic: Copied by a script from a statistics agency table or a published study's table, not retyped by hand. BLS figures and the forecast and exposure tables are also re-checked against that table on every data run. Researched context: Researched from the cited source rather than copied from it by a script, so it is not machine-checked yet. Spot a mistake? Each figure has a “Report an error” link.

Cited forecasts · present → 2035

Will AI replace producers and directors? What the research says

Each figure is stated by the named source; we publish no forecasts of our own. Where sources disagree, we show the disagreement rather than an average.

Each figure is stated by the named source; we publish no forecasts of our own. Where sources disagree, the spread is the honest signal.

What published forecasts say
Forecast change in the number of people doing this work, as published by each named source. Bars share one scale on every role, centred on zero and reaching the end at ±30%. Grey marks a small change, 3% or less either way.
BLS Employment Projections 2025-35
→ 2035
+4%
BLS National Employment Matrix, 2025-35 cycle, line for SOC 27-2012 (Producers and directors): 181.0 thousand jobs in 2025, projected 188.3 thousand in 2035, a change of +7.3 thousand (+4.0%). Matrix employment counts all jobs in the occupation, including self-employed workers (20.4% of this occupation in 2025). The average for all occupations in this cycle is +3.5%.
Official statisticReport an error
How exposed is this work to AI (research measures)
Scores as published by each study. Each row says what it measures. These measure what AI could technically do, not forecasts of jobs lost.
Eloundou et al. (2023), "GPTs are GPTs"
2023 study · Share of tasks exposed to LLMs (β, human-rated)
47.9%
of tasks
What this measures

Published occupation-level exposure from the paper's occ_level.csv for O*NET-SOC 27-2012.00 Producers and Directors. Shown: human-rated β = 0.479, the share of the occupation's tasks an LLM could do in at least half the time at equal quality, counting tasks that need LLM-powered software at half weight (β = E1 + 0.5 × E2). Other published measures for this occupation: human-rated α (LLM alone) 0.255 and γ (all LLM-assisted) 0.702; GPT-4-rated β 0.468. This measures how much of the work an LLM could touch, not how many jobs disappear.

Official statisticReport an error
Today, in this role

What's changing day to day for producers and directors

Three parts of your work where AI is already doing real lifting, and what stays yours.

AI is sitting alongside you hereProduce AI-generated b-roll and supplemental footage: using Runway Gen-4, Kling AI, or Luma Dream Machine to create establishing shots, cutaways, and location inserts from reference stills and text prompts, extending the visual palette of a production without additional shoot days.

Produce AI-generated b-roll and supplemental footage: using Runway Gen-4, Kling AI, or Luma Dream Machine to create establishing shots, cutaways, and location inserts from reference stills and text prompts, extending the visual palette of a production without additional shoot days.[7],[9],[10]

Where your edge is

AI-generated b-roll in 2026 is commercially viable for many insert and cutaway applications but still fails on consistent human faces, complex motion physics, and tight continuity requirements (Variety, Apr 2026). The producer's value is knowing when AI b-roll is acceptable vs. when it will read as artificial on screen: build a checklist of quality gates (motion artifacts, lighting continuity, skin tones) and use AI for non-hero shots where imperfections are masked by editing pace.

AI is sitting alongside you hereGenerate AI pre-visualization for a production: using Runway Gen-4 or Sora to produce shot-reference clips from script descriptions and mood-board imagery, establishing visual language for DPs and production designers before a single camera rolls, cutting pre-vis cost by 60-80% vs

Generate AI pre-visualization for a production: using Runway Gen-4 or Sora to produce shot-reference clips from script descriptions and mood-board imagery, establishing visual language for DPs and production designers before a single camera rolls, cutting pre-vis cost by 60-80% vs. traditional animatics.[7],[1]

Where your edge is

AI pre-vis is directorial communication, not a replacement for it: the clips are only as useful as the specific visual decisions you embed in the prompt (lens focal length, actor staging, light quality, emotional tone). Develop a structured shot-brief template that forces explicit decisions before you generate: directors who can translate script intent into precise visual language get production-aligned pre-vis in one round; those who prompt vaguely get generic clips that confuse the crew.

AI is sitting alongside you hereCommission AI-generated voice work for narration, dubbing, or ADR: using ElevenLabs voice cloning for narrator replacement or HeyGen AI dubbing for international distribution, then reviewing outputs for emotional accuracy, pronunciation, and brand-voice consistency before master delivery.

Commission AI-generated voice work for narration, dubbing, or ADR: using ElevenLabs voice cloning for narrator replacement or HeyGen AI dubbing for international distribution, then reviewing outputs for emotional accuracy, pronunciation, and brand-voice consistency before master delivery.[11],[12],[6]

Where your edge is

AI voice cloning for narration and dubbing is production-viable for many commercial applications but still requires consent compliance (SAG-AFTRA 2023 framework: any cloned voice of a union performer requires consent + compensation) and quality review for emotional range and unnatural cadence artifacts. Build a voice QC protocol that targets the specific failure modes of each tool (ElevenLabs performs well on neutral narration, less well on high-emotion performance) and reserve human voice talent for any lines where authentic performance quality is load-bearing.

Where producers and directors go next

Natural next steps for someone with your foundation: not exits, evolutions.

What each move takes

A direction you could grow

General and Operations Managers

Senior Producers who have managed large production budgets, multi-department teams of more than a hundred crew, complex vendor relationships, and stakeholder approvals already possess the operational core of General and Operations Manager roles: resource allocation, team leadership, deadline management, and cross-functional coordination under uncertainty. The transition requires shifting from project-to-project production cadence to ongoing operational responsibility, and typically benefits from a role in media operations, content operations, or production services as a bridge. General and Operations Managers score several CRI points higher because the management abstraction from specific craft tasks provides additional AI resilience.

What you'd add
  • · Operational systems and process documentation, building repeatable workflows vs. one-off productions
  • · People management and performance evaluation at organizational scale
  • · Financial modeling and P&L ownership beyond per-project budget management
  • · Contract and vendor management in non-production contexts (SaaS tools, service agreements)
  • · AI operations tools, deploying AI for organizational productivity at team level (Asana AI, Microsoft 365 Copilot)
What it takesSome new skills to pick up
Tools of the era

How has the work of producers and directors changed since 1895?

The tools that defined the work, one line per era. Select an era to see how it reshaped the work.

  • Hand-cranked silent camera (Lumiere Cinematographe, Edison Kinetoscope, Biograph camera)

    The earliest film directors operated the camera themselves. The act of direction was inseparable from the act of cinematography: D. W. Griffith at Biograph between 1908 and 1913 shot from behind the camera while directing his performers. The camera was a hand-cranked mechanical device; exposure, frame rate, and focus were all physical judgments made in the moment of filming. There was no playback, no sound, no second channel for the director to occupy while the camera rolled. The technical constraints of the camera literally shaped what directors could imagine: single-angle shots, short durations, and physical proximity between the director and the machine were not aesthetic choices but engineering facts.

  • Sound-on-film (The Jazz Singer 1927, Western Electric Vitaphone, RCA Photophone)

    The arrival of synchronized sound with The Jazz Singer in October 1927 was the most disruptive single technology change in the occupation's history. Silent-era directors who had built careers on physical gesture and visual storytelling suddenly faced a medium that required acoustic design, dialogue pacing, microphone placement, and coordination with sound engineers. Many silent-era directors could not make the transition: Erich von Stroheim, Rex Ingram, and others whose careers had peaked in the 1920s effectively ended with sound. The director's role split further: a separate sound department emerged on set, requiring the director to manage an additional technical relationship that had not existed before. Simultaneously, the talkies attracted stage directors from Broadway who understood dialogue but had to relearn the visual grammar Griffith had spent two decades developing. The directorial form we recognize today (sitting beside a monitor, collaborating with a DP, approving sound mixes) took its modern shape in the sound studio.

    Effect on the work

    The sound transition caused a visible turnover in the directorial workforce at major studios between 1928 and 1932. Industry estimates suggest a sizeable share of silent-era directors did not make the transition to talkies: some could not manage the accent demands of English-language dialogue, others found their style incompatible with the slower pace early sound technology required.

  • Live television production (NBC/CBS/ABC broadcast infrastructure, three-camera studio setups)

    When commercial television launched in earnest after World War II, it required a new kind of director: one who could cut live between multiple cameras in real time, coordinate floor managers and technical directors, and deliver a finished performance in a single take with no editing. The I Love Lucy production team, led by director William Asher, invented the three-camera live-audience studio format in 1951 that became the dominant sitcom production model and remained so for seven decades. Live news directing, sports directing, and variety show directing each developed distinct craft vocabularies. The Radio and Television Directors Guild, founded in 1947, was the institutional response to this new professional class. By 1960, when the RTDG merged with the Screen Directors Guild to form the DGA, television directors outnumbered film directors in the combined organization.

    Effect on the work

    Television more than doubled the employment base for professional directors between 1947 and 1960, creating a second major industrial home for the occupation alongside theatrical film. The DGA merged two organizations totaling 2,068 members in 1960, up from more than a hundred film directors counted in the 1944 studio employment survey: a roughly thirteenfold increase in sixteen years, driven almost entirely by television.

  • Video assist, Nagra/DAT portable sound, Moviola to flatbed editing (Steenbeck, KEM)

    Video assist (a video tap on the film camera that recorded what the camera saw to a monitor the director could watch) arrived on studio sets in the early 1970s and became standard through the 1980s. It fundamentally changed the director-cinematographer relationship: for the first time, the director could watch the performance live on a monitor rather than relying on the DP's report or waiting for rushes. Stanley Kubrick was an early and enthusiastic adopter; his use of video assist on The Shining (1980) is documented. Simultaneously, portable Nagra reel-to-reel and later DAT sound recorders enabled the documentary and independent film movement to expand dramatically. The transition from Moviola upright editing to flatbed KEM and Steenbeck tables in the 1970s gave editors (and the producers and directors who supervised them) a more fluid, visual editing experience. These tools together created the conditions in which the American independent film movement of the late 1970s through 1990s could exist.

  • Non-linear digital editing (Avid Media Composer 1989, Final Cut Pro 1999, digital cameras)

    Avid Technology introduced its Media Composer editing system in 1989; by the mid-1990s it had displaced tape-based linear editing suites at every major network and studio. Final Cut Pro, released in 1999, democratized professional editing for independent directors and small production companies. The combination of affordable digital cameras (Canon XL1 1997; then DSLR video from Canon 5D Mark II in 2008) and affordable non-linear editing on a laptop compressed the production cost curve dramatically. This drove an explosion of independent filmmakers and digital content producers. The occupation's BLS headcount grew from the tens of thousands in 2003 to a much larger base as digital video production became accessible to a broad professional class outside the studio system.

    Effect on the work

    Digital democratization expanded the occupation's lower tier significantly: thousands of commercial directors, music video directors, wedding videographers with production companies, and digital content producers entered the BLS 27-2012 category who would not have qualified as "producers and directors" under the older studio-system definition. This explains much of the observed employment growth in the 2003-2015 period.

  • Streaming production pipeline (Netflix Originals 2013, cloud-based post, virtual production LED volumes)

    Netflix released its first original series, House of Cards, in February 2013, marking the beginning of a streaming content boom that would, by 2020, have Amazon, Disney, Apple, HBO Max, Paramount+, and Peacock all competing for prestige content. Streaming platforms replaced the traditional broadcast development process with a model of direct greenlight orders, larger per-episode budgets, and global simultaneous release. For directors and producers, streaming created more projects, larger below-the-line budgets, and a new power dynamic: the showrunner-EP role, held by the writer-director who commanded creative authority over a series' full arc, became the most sought-after position in the industry. LED volume stages (the Unreal Engine-powered "volume" used on The Mandalorian from 2019) began to change location scouting and physical production by enabling realistic digital environments on set.

    Effect on the work

    DGA membership grew from approximately 12,000 in 2000 to over 19,500 by 2024, an increase driven largely by the streaming expansion. BLS OEWS employment for 27-2012 grew from 54,370 in 2003 to 145,270 in 2024: a nearly threefold increase, reflecting both the streaming content boom and the explosive growth of digital video, branded content, and social media production.

  • AI production toolkit (Runway Gen-4, Sora, Kling, DaVinci Resolve AI, ElevenLabs, Cinelytic)

    AI video generation tools reached commercial production viability in 2022-2026: Runway Gen-2 (2023), Sora commercial launch (February 2026), Runway Gen-4 Ultra (March 2026), Kling AI 2.0 (2025), and Luma Dream Machine collectively enabled directors and producers to generate b-roll footage, pre-visualization sequences, and concept development materials from text prompts and reference images. AI post-production tools (DaVinci Resolve 20's AI Magic Mask, Adobe Premiere Pro Generative Extend, Topaz Video AI) reduced routine color, conform, and cleanup time per minute of output. AI dubbing (ElevenLabs, HeyGen) made multilingual delivery practical at small-production scale. The DGA's 2024 AI policy framework and the WGA 2023 Basic Agreement AI provisions established the key legal boundary: AI is a tool under director and writer control, not an autonomous replacement for creative authorship.

    Effect on the work

    AI tools are compressing production budgets and timelines rather than eliminating directors. PwC projects the entertainment and media sector will grow at 4.6% CAGR through 2029, driven partly by AI-enabled content at lower per-minute cost.

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Producers and Directors employment and pay by year

On record since1895
Latest US employment143,120 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error
Latest US median pay$90,360 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error
Outlook+4% by 2035Source: BLS Employment Projections 2025-35Official statisticReport an error
View all 27 years of cited US data, each linked to its source
YearUS employmentAnnual pay (median unless marked)SourceReport
1937n/a$35,500Est., "Salaries of Hollywood in 1937"… Researched contextReport
1940160n/aEst., EBSCO Research Starters Researched contextReport
19602,068n/aEst., DGA Quarterly Researched contextReport
200012,000n/aEst., DGA Researched contextReport
200354,370$48,200BLS OEWS May 2003 Official statisticReport
200455,260$52,840BLS OEWS May 2004 Official statisticReport
200559,070$53,860BLS OEWS May 2005 Official statisticReport
200663,840$56,310BLS OEWS May 2006 Official statisticReport
200772,390$61,090BLS OEWS May 2007 Official statisticReport
200878,060$64,430BLS OEWS May 2008 Official statisticReport
200979,780$66,720BLS OEWS May 2009 Official statisticReport
201083,520$68,440BLS OEWS May 2010 Official statisticReport
201182,880$70,660BLS OEWS May 2011 Official statisticReport
201287,010$71,350BLS OEWS May 2012 Official statisticReport
201392,510$69,480BLS OEWS May 2013 Official statisticReport
201497,300$69,100BLS OEWS May 2014 Official statisticReport
2015104,650$68,440BLS OEWS May 2015 Official statisticReport
2016114,510$70,950BLS OEWS May 2016 Official statisticReport
2017117,520$71,620BLS OEWS May 2017 Official statisticReport
2018118,630$71,680BLS OEWS May 2018 Official statisticReport
2019129,210$74,420BLS OEWS May 2019 Official statisticReport
2020119,490$76,400BLS OEWS May 2020 Official statisticReport
2021138,250$79,000BLS OEWS May 2021 Official statisticReport
2022153,770$85,320BLS OEWS May 2022 Official statisticReport
2023154,470$82,510BLS OEWS May 2023 Official statisticReport
2024145,270$83,480BLS OEWS May 2024 Official statisticReport
2025143,120$90,360BLS OEWS May 2025 Official statisticReport
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