Zachary Levi grew up loving California.

Then he watched the place he loved come apart.

And now the Shazam! star is building something totally different eight hundred miles away, for a reason that has nothing to do with the weather.

Levi’s Blunt Verdict On The Golden State

The Shazam! and Chuck star called his home state a “failed state” during a new Fox News interview with his The Fix co-star Liam Neeson. He didn’t hedge on it either.

“I grew up in California, I love California, it is a failed state,” he told Fox News Digital.

He wasn’t finished. Levi, 45, said California is “literally and figuratively on fire” while explaining why he bought land outside Austin, Texas, and began working toward his own film studio.

That’s not a throwaway line from a guy chasing a headline. He eventually bought 75 acres outside Austin in 2017. This has been years in the making.

Levi has been developing Wyldwood Studios, a roughly $100 million production campus and community on 75 acres in Bastrop County. The project is expected to include soundstages, housing, hospitality spaces and other facilities built around his idea of giving filmmakers an alternative to the traditional Hollywood studio system.

He’s not just leaving. He’s building the alternative himself.

Why He Walked Away From The Industry He Grew Up In

Levi said his decision to look elsewhere also grew out of frustrations he had developed with Hollywood itself. After working inside the entertainment industry, he began imagining a studio where artists had more ownership and fewer layers separating them from the work being produced.

It wasn’t a snap decision made in a moment of frustration.

He explained the origin story to Fox News. “So, that all culminated in nine years ago, me finding 75 acres outside of Austin, Texas, to buy, to develop, to turn into this magical kind of idea. That’s why I left.”

And before that, he framed the broader problem he saw around him. “We look at the regular world around us, and we see it burning. And we’re like, ‘Can we do this better? I feel like we can do this better,” Levi added.

That’s a working actor looking at the industry that made him famous and deciding the whole model needs replacing, not just relocating.

Levi isn’t promoting a movie by trashing his home state for clicks. He’s putting a hundred million dollars behind an alternative to prove his point.

What This Says About California’s Exodus Problem

Levi is far from the only entertainer who packed up and left California in recent years, and he won’t be the last.

The pattern keeps repeating. Actors and producers who spent decades building careers in Los Angeles are increasingly deciding the tradeoffs aren’t worth it anymore, whether that’s wildfire risk, cost of living, or a state government that keeps piling on regulations and taxes that make running a business, including a film studio, harder every year.

Levi’s specific complaint wasn’t really about weather or scenery. It was about a “failed state,” a phrase that carries real political weight coming from someone who spent his whole career embedded in the industry most associated with that state.

California’s business and regulatory climate has been pushing production dollars to other states for years now. Texas has no state income tax, a lighter regulatory touch, and local governments that are actively courting the kind of investment Levi is making in Bastrop County. That’s not an accident. That’s the direct result of two very different governing philosophies, one that taxes and regulates businesses until they leave, and one that tries to make itself the destination.

Other industries have been having the same conversation for years. Companies have relocated headquarters out of California to Texas, Florida, and Tennessee citing nearly identical reasons: high taxes, expensive housing, and a regulatory environment that treats businesses as a revenue source rather than a partner. Hollywood is simply the latest to feel the pinch, and Levi is one of the more prominent names willing to say it out loud instead of quietly moving and staying silent about why.

Whether Wyldwood Studios becomes the model other displaced filmmakers follow remains to be seen. But the fact that a working actor is willing to sink $100 million and build an entire campus from scratch rather than stay in the system that made him famous says something about how far confidence in California’s direction has fallen among the people who used to define it.

Sources: Fox News Digital, Yahoo Entertainment