WGA Strike Status: Devastating Week Brings More Uncertainty That a Deal Will Be Reached Soon
Writers and past contestants picketed Jeopardy on Monday as part of the WGA strike, after the game show started filming with recycled questions (via @WGAWest).
Reality often outpaces fiction, and that is especially true in the case of the ongoing dual strike in Hollywood. After 100 days of the Writers Guild of America being on strike, the studios finally decided to sit down with the union to negotiate a deal. Hopes were up that the WGA would be able to settle and end part of the work stoppage, restarting the entire pipeline from the top, and that after that, the studios would go to the actors and put a definitive end to the strike.
However, even though they hadn’t had any income in over three months, the writers were still not ready to bend to the studios’ will. The AMPTP extended an offer on August 11 that they were hoping would cover the bases of what the writers were asking for, and it would be enough to get everyone back to work by Labor Day. However, that did not happen as smoothly as the studios hoped, and the guild rejected the offer after a few back-and-forth meetings. In a desperate move, the AMPTP released that offer to the media last week, hoping they would reach the low-ranking members of the guild and that they would exert pressure on the negotiating committee to accept an offer that was moderately acceptable so they could go back to work.
Whether that ultimately happened or not, we don’t really know. Social media seems to back Ellen Stutzman, David A. Goodman, and Chris Keyser, heads of the negotiating committee, and still paint the studios as the villains of the story. But there’s obviously a lot of behind-the-scenes conversations we are not privy to, and things are getting really ugly overall. Knives are out on both sides, from the WGA slamming the studios’ move as one “not to bargain, but to jam us”, to issuing an antitrust report on August 17 against Disney, Amazon, and Netflix, with which they also aimed at creating chaos within the AMPTP.
Meanwhile, Disney CEO Bob Iger continues to be devoted to his heel turn since he took over the company, reportedly being “personally offended” that the WGA did not agree to the deal, while Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos fears that the North American strike will extend to other territories, which would severely mess with the streamer’s global strategy. Why care about the United States when you can have content from all over the world, created by people from every country for the people in that territory? Thanks to the efforts by Minyoung Kim, VP of content in Asia/Pacific, except India, the streamer has been doubling or even tripling down on South Korean and Japanese series and TV shows that are not only extremely popular in those territories but also are having a global impact — the biggest example being Squid Game.
The studios are also worried about the optics that the dual WGA/SAG-AFTRA strike is bringing to them, and to try to put down the fire, they hired last week the Levinson Group, a PR firm they hope will be able to turn the ship around for them, Deadline reported.
The writers did not stay put, and shortly after the studios revealed to the public details of their offer, the WGA negotiating committee detailed why it wasn’t what they were hoping for. Essentially, there are three major holdouts here. First, it’s the issue of minimum staffing — the writers want the studios to guarantee they will hire a certain minimum number of writers per show, depending on how many episodes it’s greenlit for. The studios counter-offered saying that they would allow the showrunner to choose how many writers he wants on his show.
It’s a good middle ground, in theory, but the issue here comes with the figure of the showrunner — this is a broadly-defined term that can be manipulated by the contract and whose power isn’t really defined anywhere. There is no listing for “Showrunner” on the opening credits of any show, for instance. In any case, though, this has been one of the issues highlighted as something the writers will have to give up on at some point, mostly because there’s even some internal division on the matter — good luck telling Taylor Sheridan he has to hire five other writers to work on his Yellowstone sequel series.
Then, there’s the issue of artificial intelligence. This has been a hot topic as well, and it seems like the studios are finally coming to their senses and agreeing to some regulations. They guarantee that no writer will be disadvantaged by the use of AI, and that if a studio wants to hire a writer to punch up a script that has been artificially created, they will receive sole credit and compensation as if they had worked on it since the beginning. It’s very promising in theory, but the guild expressed in their memo they still want assurances on paper that their scripts will not be used to train new algorithms. This is also an area where the guild is being extremely careful on, because it’s new ground for everyone and they fear they will overlook a loophole that the studios will be able to exploit in the coming years. And it might be too late to renegotiate this by the time the next contract expires.
And finally, there’s the issue of data transparency, which seems to be the one that will take a lot of time to negotiate. The studios seemed to concede on some level and agree to show the writers, in confidence, the number of hours watched their programming on their streaming services every three months. But the guild was able to see through their BS — according to their memo:
“Finally, the companies say they have made a major concession by offering to allow six WGA staff to study limited streaming viewership data for the next three years, so we can return in 2026 to ask once again for a viewership-based residual. In the meantime, no writer can be told by the WGA about how well their project is doing, much less receive a residual based on that data.”
If I were to guess, I think that the writers will eventually have to agree to the terms of the first two proposals, but the data transparency issue will be the hill they will choose to die on. Ultimately, this is all about money, which the WGA memo on the strike negotiations update did address — according to their calculations, giving the writers the deal they are asking for would account for 0.18% of the studios’ annual income, on average:
There is speculation that, with the AMPTP seemingly at an impasse in their negotiations to end the WGA strike, they will go back to the actors and try to cut a deal with them. Initially, the studios went to the writers because the rhetoric coming out of the first few weeks of SAG-AFTRA picketing was just too strong to deal with; mysteriously, though, the SAG-AFTRA negotiating committee, and especially the union’s president Fran Drescher, has been strangely quiet over the past few days. However, even if this is the case, the actors have even bigger demands for data transparency, as they ask for 2% of revenue.
This is all coming down as the fall season is upon us, as well as the festival season. SAG-AFTRA has been busy over the past couple of weeks handing out interim agreements to indie productions left and right to allow their actors to attend the upcoming film festivals — while this may seem counterintuitive in a time where no one from Ahsoka can go on Twitter and even acknowledge they are on the show, Adam Driver can go on podcasts to promote Ferrari (I’m sure he’s so looking forward to that).
Meanwhile, Warner Bros. and Legendary are pushing Dune: Part Two into March 2024 because they can’t guarantee Zendaya and Timothée Chalamet will be able to promote the film. More titles are expected to follow over the next few weeks, and especially at risk are The Marvels and Wonka. Sony Pictures has already bumped most of its fall schedule into next year, except for Dumb Money and The Equalizer 3, both September titles. The eyes are also on next summer, and it’s very much in the air whether studios will be able to complete the films they have scheduled for then.
Stay tuned as the situation continues to develop.
Miguel Fernández is a Spanish student that has movies as his second passion in life. His favorite movie of all time is The Lord of the Rings, but he is also a huge Star Wars fan. However, fantasy movies are not his only cup of tea, as authors like Scorsese, Fincher, Kubrick or Hitchcock have been an obsession for him since he started to understand the language of filmmaking. He is that guy who will watch a black and white movie, just because it is in black and white.
