Hollywood on hold: actors join writers on the picket line

Hollywood studios thought they could “ride out” the screenwriters’ strike, which began in May, and keep the dream factory open, said Meg James in the Los Angeles Times. But now that Hollywood’s actors have joined writers for the biggest Tinseltown shutdown since 1960, things aren’t turning out that way.

“Movie shoots have ground to a halt”, with big-budget sequels such as “Gladiator 2” and “Deadpool 3” shutting down in the middle of shooting. “A-list stars have bailed on film and TV marketing campaigns.” And there’s deadlock between the two main players: the 160,000-member actors’ union, Sag-Aftra, and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), which represents the big studios. The union argues that the advent of streaming has enabled studios to unfairly cut their pay. They also want “protections against the use of AI” in film and TV.

Streaming scrambled tradition income model

“There will be no fresh helpings of “The White Lotus”, “The Last of Us”​​​​​​​ or even “Emily in Paris”​​​​​​​ beaming into front rooms when summer fades,” said Vanessa Thorpe in The Guardian US. Americans, and much of the world with them, had got used to an endless stream of high-quality entertainment.

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But now they are coming face to face with the uncomfortable fact that, even as entertainment choices have exploded, creators haven’t shared in the bounty. Actors – like writers – “have traditionally had a base of income” from repeat showings, said Michael Schulman in The New Yorker. But “streaming has scrambled that model”, and endangered “the ability of working actors to make a living”.

In the old days, residual payments could yield a good living. The cast of “​​​​​​​Friends”, for instance, would earn millions every time a series was rerun. But on streaming platforms there are no reruns as such: shows are put up there permanently, and actors complain that they make peanuts. In one celebrated case, an actress playing a recurring character in “​​​​​​​Orange Is the New Black” – a big hit for Netflix – received precisely $27.30 in residuals. Some cast members have been considering turning to food stamps. Sag-Aftra negotiators are demanding residuals partly based on audience numbers for streaming services. But those platforms disagree, and they are not even willing to share commercially sensitive viewing numbers.

‘Us against them is straight out of Les Miz’

The use of generative AI has also been a major point of contention at the negotiating table, said Andrew Webster on The Verge. Many actors fear that, without strict regulation, their work could be replicated and remixed by artificial intelligence tools, and that such transformations will both cut their control over their work and hurt their ability to earn a living. Sag-Aftra claims – though the studios dispute it – that the bosses want people who play film and TV extras “to be scanned, get 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”.

The “us against them”, haves vs. have-nots mood in Hollywood is “straight out of ‘Les Miz’”, said Brooks Barnes in The New York Times. Striking actors have pointed to the pay packages of studio heads: Warner Bros. Discovery’s David Zaslav, for instance, got an astonishing $246.6m in 2021. But beneath the surface, the studios are facing existential questions. Entertainment companies are still trying to grapple with the erratic economics of streaming, along with lower box-office figures and the demise of traditional broadcast and cable – their bread and butter for decades. At the moment, no talks are happening between the union leaders and the studios, and none have been scheduled. There’s no sign of a Hollywood ending.