Hollywood actors union joined screenwriters in a double strike that is likely to cripple the movie industry. We explain what happened and how it is likely to affect your viewing pleasure.
Meet the players
The Writers Guild of America: represents 11,500 writers of film, television, documentaries and any form of entertainment. The WGA has east and west wings—which, however, negotiate as one unit.
SAG-AFTRA: stands for Screen Actors Guild - American Federation of Television and Radio Artists. It represents more than 150,000 television and movie actors—from extras to A-list stars.
Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers: represents studios, TV networks, streaming platforms and producers in all negotiations with industry unions.
Point to note: The Directors Guild of America represents all film and television directors. It is not a player in the current drama as it already ratified a new contract with the AMPTP in May.
The prelude: The writers strike
In May, the WGA went on strike for the first time in 15 years. At the heart of their discontent: the rise of streaming. And here’s why.
Gig writing: Streaming services like Netflix use smaller teams of writers who work for a shorter period of time and for lower pay—known as ‘mini rooms’. It is more difficult to earn a sustainable income. WGA argues that they have turned screenwriting into gig work—making them entirely dispensable:
Take the recent Netflix series ‘Beef’. On that show, the mini-room actually finished before the finale. That meant creator Lee Sung Jin was left to finish the last episode of the series alone, during production.
Also an issue: residuals. This is the money a writer makes every time a script they helped write airs on a channel or a platform. But streaming platforms have a different model than TV studios:
In streaming, the companies have not agreed to pay residuals at the same level as broadcast, or the same reward-for-success as they have traditionally paid in broadcast. If you write for a streamer, you get two residuals payments – one for domestic streaming and one for foreign streaming. It’s a set amount of money. If it’s a big hit, you do not get paid more residuals in streaming, whereas in the broadcast model, you do because of its success.
So producers make a pile of money when a show is a success, the writers do not.
The AI problem: Writers are naturally concerned about studios replacing them with machines. And the WGA wants to make sure that a ChatGPT is treated as a tool not a person:
[T]he guild wants to make sure that “literary material” — the… term for screenplays, teleplays, outlines, treatments, and other things that people write — can’t be generated by an AI. In other words, ChatGPT and its cousins can’t be credited with writing a screenplay. If a movie made by a studio that has an agreement with the WGA has a writing credit—and that’s over 350 of America’s major studios and production companies—then the writer needs to be a person.
Also this: Studios often hire writers to adapt source material—for example, a book. WGA wants to make sure anything produced by AI is not treated as ‘source material’:
It’s very easy to imagine a situation in which a studio uses AI to generate ideas or drafts, claims those ideas are “source material,” and hires a writer to polish it up for a lower rate. “We believe that is not source material, any more than a Wikipedia article is source material,” says [John] August. “That’s the crux of what we’re negotiating.”
The management’s response: The AMPTP has been dismissive of the writers’ concerns. It points out that the amount paid out to writers has actually increased—which is true since the number of shows have risen exponentially due to the streaming boom. But the average payout per writer has decreased—and senior writers are no longer well-compensated for their experience. But there has been little interest in negotiating with the writers—instead AMPTP’s goal is to wear them down:
Receiving positive feedback from Wall Street since the WGA went on strike May 2, Warner Bros Discovery, Apple, Netflix, Amazon, Disney, Paramount and others have become determined to “break the WGA,” as one studio exec blatantly put it. To do so, the studios and the AMPTP believe that by October most writers will be running out of money after five months on the picket lines and no work.
“The endgame is to allow things to drag on until union members start losing their apartments and losing their houses,” a studio executive told Deadline. Acknowledging the cold-as-ice approach, several other sources reiterated the statement. One insider called it “a cruel but necessary evil.”
The dramatic twist: The actor’s strike
While the writers have walked off the job eight times in the past seventy years, actors have rarely gone on strike. The last time was in 1980 when they were concerned by the rise of video rentals and sales. More importantly, this is the first time in 63 years that both unions have put their tools down:
Actors and screenwriters had not been on strike at the same time since 1960, when Marilyn Monroe was still starring in films and Ronald Reagan was the head of the actors’ union. Dual strikes pit more than 170,000 workers against old-line studios like Disney, Universal, Sony and Paramount, as well tech juggernauts like Netflix, Amazon and Apple.
The lead up: The actors union has long been divided and prone to infighting. Studios did not expect them to come together and actually strike. The first sign of trouble came in June when 98% of SAG-AFTRA members voted to authorise its leadership to strike. Later that month, prominent actors like Meryl Streep signed an open letter to the guild leadership, declaring pointedly that “we are prepared to strike.”
The strike: At 11:59 pm on Wednesday, the deadline for negotiations with the AMPTP expired—and the actors went on strike. Announcing the decision, SAG-AFTRA president Fran Drescher declared:
I am shocked by the way the people that we have been in business with are treating us! How far apart we are on so many things. How they plead poverty, that they’re losing money left and right when giving hundreds of millions of dollars to their C.E.O.s. It is disgusting. Shame on them!
You can watch an angry Drescher at the press conference below:
What the actors want: Their demands are similar to those of the writers—and also focus on how technology has disrupted the entertainment industry. As Drescher puts it: “You cannot change the business model as much as it has changed and not expect the contract to change, too.”
All about compensation: TV seasons were longer and with more episodes. So when shows were syndicated, actors could rely on a steady source of income between jobs. But streaming shows have fewer episodes—which means they are working less and have wider gaps between jobs. Hence, all actors want to be paid more—not just the A-list kind.
About those residuals: Streaming services are notoriously close-mouthed about viewership numbers. So actors are not rewarded if their shows or films are a success—unlike the old model where a single hit could pay bills for years:
[Actor Eric] Edelstein still collects checks from cable reruns of the 2015 film “Jurassic World,” in which he had a small role as a paddock supervisor for dinosaurs. In a recent quarter, the cable residuals totaled $1,400. By comparison, he received only $40 for reruns of the movie on streaming platforms during the same period, he said.
The AI problem: Deep fake technology is a huge concern—since their likeness and voices can be easily mimicked to save costs. Actors already sign away rights to their characters so that the studio can use them in amusement parks and as action figures. Now, it can use it to simply ‘deep fake’ the character.
According to SAG–AFTRA, the studios proposed doing just that:
In that groundbreaking AI proposal, they proposed that our background performers should be able to be scanned, get paid for one day’s pay, and their company should own that scan, their image, their likeness, and should be able to use it for the rest of eternity in any project they want with no consent and no compensation.
What happens next
Here is the fallout of this double strike:
One: The SAG strike means that actors cannot work for any of the studios represented by the AMPTP—or promote their shows and films. That’s why Cillian Murphy, Matt Damon, Emily Blunt and others walked out of the London premiere of ‘Oppenheimer’ last night. Late night shows have already shut down due to the writers strike. Without actors, award shows like the Emmy’s and this year’s Comic-Con will follow suit.
Two: Expect to see star-studded picket lines. Some of the biggest names have already come out in support of the writers strike—including Susan Sarandon, Tina Fey and Bob Odenkirk. All that negative publicity is likely to be a bigger headache for studios than a bunch of angry writers.
Three: Movies scheduled for release in the next couple of months won’t be affected. But the lack of movie stars to promote the next batch “makes each release a risk not just stateside but also at the overseas box office, where talent is crucial for spreading buzz on a tentpole.” Any movie scheduled anytime in 2024 early will be delayed—since post-production work is impossible.
Point to note: The writers strike has already shut down big budget productions like ‘The Last of Us’, ‘Blade Runner 2099’ and ‘The Mandalorian’—while future projects— such as the sequel to ‘Spider-Man: No Way Home’, and Disney’s ‘Blade’ remake—have also stalled. Now, even productions with completed scripts will come to a crashing halt. These include TV shows such as ‘House of the Dragon’, ‘Andor’ and ‘Industry’—and films due to finish shooting like ‘Gladiator 2’ and ‘Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part Two’.
The management response: so far has been to brave it out. Disney chief Bob Iger blamed both unions for making impossible demands—at a time when studios are haemorrhaging money and are under pressure to cut costs:
There’s a level of expectation that they have that is just not realistic. And they are adding to the set of challenges that this business is already facing, that is quite frankly, very disruptive… It will have a very, very damaging effect on the whole business.
OTOH, in their letter to union leaders, actors like Ben Stiller wrote:
This is not a moment to meet in the middle, and it’s not an exaggeration to say that the eyes of history are on all of us. We ask that you push for all the change we need and protections we deserve and make history doing it.
Quote to note: As Vox sums it up, the stalemate is a result of two vastly different worldviews:
The reality is that studios and production companies are increasingly embedded in larger corporations and tech companies that are beholden to shareholders, and the way they think and talk about profit and revenue is different from the way the people who take home a paycheck do.
It is difficult to see an incentive for either side to back down.
The bottomline: Technology has always created great division and disruption in Hollywood. In 1960, actors were upset about the advent of television. In the 1980s, it was all about videos. But this time, they’re facing a double whammy: streaming plus AI. The irony, of course, is that each disruption has given the rest of us more to watch and enjoy. Well, there will be less of that in the months to come.
Reading list
CNBC and Axios have good overviews—while New York Times looks at why the studios were caught by surprise. CBS News lists the offer made by AMPTP. The Guardian and Deadline looks at the fallout of the strike. Vox has the most detailed explainers on both the actors and writers strikes. Deadline looks at the plan to ‘break’ the writers’ rebellion.
