WGA and Studios Meet on Friday for Third Day in a Row as Deal Draws Near
WGA West member Kayla Westergard-Dobson speaking in support of unemployment insurance for striking workers in California at an Amazon picket line. Photo via @WGAWest on Twitter.
As you may have heard by now, the negotiating committees from the writers’ guild and the AMPTP returned this week to the bargaining table, with hopes up across town that a deal would finally be reached and the WGA strike would come to an end. After two productive sessions on Wednesday and Thursday, both parties agreed to meet again on Friday, and indications are that a deal could be closed within the next week.
Coming out of the Wednesday meeting, CNBC reported that a deal could be closed as soon as Thursday. David Faber, who co-wrote the article, posted on social media that “without deal tomorrow strike likely continues through year end”, which was obviously a ridiculous notion. These things take time to iron out, even if both ends come into the meeting pre-disposed to shake hands. And that is very much what happened. The two sides met back on Thursday, and apparently, talks progressed even further, with some hints that a deal may have already been reached.
Reporter Jeff Sneider cited a trusted source of his on the Hot Mic podcast on Thursday saying that a deal had apparently been reached, though he still needed to confirm so — that final thumbs up never came. Matt Belloni included a similar bit on his What I’m Hearing newsletter on Thursday night, but explained it in more detail. Apparently, the studios thought they had a deal by 5pm PT on Thursday, but that was not entirely the case — the big holdout at the moment seems to be the issue of minimum staffing in writers’ rooms, a key issue for the WGA that the AMPTP has barely engaged with in almost five months of the strike. (They did offer the writers the possibility of the showrunner choosing how many writers they want in the room, but that had many loopholes in and of itself, the guild argued.) California Governor Gavin Newsom checked in on Thursday to see where things were standing, and he could be more involved in the next few days.
Per The Hollywood Reporter, on Thursday both parties spsent a lot of time arguing about core issues like artificial intelligence and residual compensation/streaming data transparency. Studio-side sources told the trade that progress was made on all of those. The meeting was attended by the heads of the four big companies: Donna Langley from Universal, Bob Iger from Disney, David Zaslav from Warner Bros. Discovery, and Ted Sarandos from Netflix. They were also part of the negotiations with the WGA on Wednesday and are expected to return on Friday, the next scheduled meeting; this is highly unusual, as studio heads usually delegate these negotiations to labor executives.
The fact that the Thursday meeting went from 8.30am to past 6pm was also a positive sign that both parties were willing to engage with each other and get this thing done, though the fact that they didn’t release a joint statement on Thursday like they did on Wednesday was not the best of signs. Pressure is now on both sides, though, to get a deal done on this round of negotiations. As Sneider also pointed out, the ideal situation would be to get it all wrapped up within the next few days so that writers go back to work on Monday, October 2. That would effectively restart the pipeline and give studios a lot of momentum to then negotiate with the actors. SAG-AFTRA’s demands have a lot in common with the WGA’s, so it’s expected that the deal the AMPTP is able to reach with the writers will be extended to the actors.
As far as the schedule for the rest of the year is concerned, everything points to no more delays coming, despite heavy rumors that studios would be moving most of their fall slates to early next year. Between the first look at Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom to new looks at The Marvels, the upcoming Hunger Games prequel, or Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, marketing departments are trying to let everyone know that things are going to stay the way they are.
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.
