WGA/SAGAFTRA Strike Discussion Thread | SAG Ratifies Contract

[Dementeleus]

2 minutes ago, 21C said:

It'd not be unreasonable to think that whether the WGA and SAG wins or loses is dependant on whether this bill passes the senate. If it doesn't, both unions will be in a reaaally screwed and weak position going forward. I'm already skeptical of them winning as is.

Why would they be in a really screwed and weakened position? The bill would help down the road for future strikes (if it passes), and it could alleviate some financial pain if this strike goes really long, but it’s not the kind of thing that will make or break the whole thing. 
 

Here’s some perspective on that Wrap nonsense:

 

[21C]

3 minutes ago, Plain Old Tele said:

Why would they be in a really screwed and weakened position? The bill would help down the road for future strikes (if it passes), and it could alleviate some financial pain if this strike goes really long, but it’s not the kind of thing that will make or break the whole thing. 
 

Here’s some perspective on that Wrap nonsense:

 

I mean... they already are in a weak position though. Anecdotal, but I've read lots of tweets from writers saying they've had to start selling their houses or are getting more and more desperate financially by the day to the point morale is kinda going down. It is not insane for me that 4 more months of this could just spell doom for them. Far too many people are hurting; and as much as the studios are ""hurting"", truth of the matter is that Iger, Zaslav, Sarandos, etc are probably personally perfectly comfortable at the moment. The effects of the strike are annoying/stressful for them, but not existential in the way that for most members of the WGA and SAG is. 

Edited September 12, 2023 by 21C

[Dementeleus]

10 minutes ago, 21C said:

I mean... they already are in a weak position though. 

I disagree, I think the writers have the upper hand right now. Things are very hard for them financially right now, of course — as they are for actors and crew — but there’s far more support for them (financial and otherwise) than on other recent strikes. Feature writers, sadly, are used to going 7, 8, even 9 months without being paid (and that’s AFTER they’ve finished the paperwork on a sold script!), and TV writers are used to big gaps in the year while they wait for a season pickup. I don’t have any brilliant insider knowledge, but I *am* going through the same struggles as other crew people and I’m walking the picket lines when I can. The unions are far stronger and united than I’ve seen even recently (our IATSE negotiations a year or so ago got pretty messy, as an example). 
 

Morale and energy is very high, across the board. There’s literally a showrunner picket line set up for tomorrow.

[AMC Theaters Enjoyer]

The AMPTP’s new PR firm is getting to work I see.

[21C]

Also, I will say this:

A lot of the actors and writers hopes for winning seem completely dependant on this idea that the investors and stockholders will be the heroes in this and that they'll look at the studios and go "😠Why aren't you treating workers better? Very very vad Mr. Iger/Sarandos/Zaslav/Cook/etc," and whip out their belt and fire them when that has always seemed like an incredibly far-fetched, copium-induced scenario lmao

Yeah, I know there's that  one analyst that said something along those lines a few weeks ago but... come on, let's not be delusional, he can complain about it but even he didn't say anything about possibly demanding the firing of any of these execs lmao. 

Investors know that the execs are fighting almost exclusively out of greed, and you know what Wall Street likes very very much? Greed. Even if they personally can gossip about how maybe they shouldn't do that, the track record of most of these execs speaks for itself. They are greedy, and investors have benefitted from that greed far too much over years and years to even contemplate the idea of firing them over this.

You think they're gonna fire Iger after they spent 2 years almost begging in their hands and knees to come back and when they have no good replacement for him lined up yet? Come on. You think they're gonna fire Zaslav when he's been doing /everything/ they wanted him to do against PR and everything else,  and when he's the man that turned Discovery into an entertainment empire so large and vast that it was able to buy Warner Bros? Again, come on. Same applies to Sarandos, same applies to most other executives.

These people are not going to be punished in any way. It's better to let go of that notion.  There is not gonna be some magical event that happens here that'll save the writers and actors. And even if they investors get mega annoyed with the strike it's not like they can easily point the finger at anybody. All execs, by negotiating through the AMPTP, have plausible deniability in which they can't be held individually  responsible for the state of the strikes. I'm not saying it doesn't have an impact on the execs, having to reshuffle that many things around is more work for them and that sucks, but they're not under this threat of being fired which so many on SAG and the WGA seem to think they are. 

[JustLurking]

I am slightly confused on why you wrote this big wall of text over something I honestly haven't seen many people hope for let alone expect

 

it's not like it matters anyway, even if they were fired whoever was brought in would just be another greedy exec, it doesn't make any difference

 

companies are not your friends, regardless of who's sitting in the top dog chair

Edited September 12, 2023 by JustLurking

[Dementeleus]

32 minutes ago, 21C said:

Also, I will say this:

A lot of the actors and writers hopes for winning seem completely dependant on this idea that the investors and stockholders will be the heroes in this and that they'll look at the studios and go "😠Why aren't you treating workers better? Very very vad Mr. Iger/Sarandos/Zaslav/Cook/etc," and whip out their belt and fire them when that has always seemed like an incredibly far-fetched, copium-induced scenario lmao
 

While I’m sure a great many writers and actors would be delighted if the CEOs got ditched, I haven't heard anyone mention that as a plan or hope for resolving the strike. They’re very blunt: they expect the studios to continue losing money until they choose to make a deal. They’re not expecting Wall Street to react altruistically, they’re expecting them to (at some point) realize how much money they’ll keep losing until they negotiate a deal. 

[21C]

11 minutes ago, Plain Old Tele said:

While I’m sure a great many writers and actors would be delighted if the CEOs got ditched, I haven't heard anyone mention that as a plan or hope for resolving the strike. They’re very blunt: they expect the studios to continue losing money until they choose to make a deal. They’re not expecting Wall Street to react altruistically, they’re expecting them to (at some point) realize how much money they’ll keep losing until they negotiate a deal. 

That is what I'm talking about though: They expect that the quarterly earnings reports will be so dire Wall Street will punish the execs in some way and that the execs are scared of that, when in reality, that actually does not seem likely to happen. Stock price might go down but even if it does they can brush it off because it'll go back up once the strikes are done, like it did with COVID shutdowns. The strikes are an  annoyance to execs, they're not existential, which is what automatically keeps putting the studios in a stronger position.

Edited September 12, 2023 by 21C

[Dementeleus]

6 minutes ago, 21C said:

That is what I'm talking about though: They expect that the quarterly earnings reports will be so dire Wall Street will punish the execs in some way and that the execs are scared of that, when in reality, that actually does not seem likely to happen. Stock price might go down but even if it does they can brush it off because it'll go back up once the strikes are done, like it did with COVID shutdowns. The strikes are an  annoyance to execs, they're not existential, which is what automatically keeps putting the studios in a stronger position.

Putting aside company stock numbers, they’re just flat out losing money. 
 

WB alone lost 300-500m over the summer (their numbers). The cost of agreeing to the WGA’s asks is in the 430m range, for three years. One studio alone has already neared that total.
 

And this while they still had some new movies being released. They’ll still have movies coming out through the end of the year, but then things get pretty thin for them. And features take awhile to get made. On the TV side, they’ve already lost essentially a whole season of advertising. 

 

The longer this goes on, the more catastrophic the revenue loss will be. 

[21C]

3 hours ago, Plain Old Tele said:

Putting aside company stock numbers, they’re just flat out losing money. 
 

WB alone lost 300-500m over the summer (their numbers). The cost of agreeing to the WGA’s asks is in the 430m range, for three years. One studio alone has already neared that total.
 

And this while they still had some new movies being released. They’ll still have movies coming out through the end of the year, but then things get pretty thin for them. And features take awhile to get made. On the TV side, they’ve already lost essentially a whole season of advertising. 

 

The longer this goes on, the more catastrophic the revenue loss will be. 

My point isn't to say that the studios aren't being affected, they absolutely are, and it's no doubt generating a headache in the minds of all the CEOs, but:
A headache is way, waaaay different than straight-up losing your house and barely having any money to afford food, which is the situation many WGA and SAG members already find themselves in and will find themselves in, in the coming months. This is intensified by the fact that for Apple and Amazon it's not even a headache because those two companies are too big to care about a few months lost of their entertainment division that much. 

That is the main reason I think that the AMPTP stands stronger over here. Are they being evil and morally reprehensible? Absolutely. Is there probably a ton of squabbling inside the ranks of the AMPTP with all their different business models that's delaying this unnecessarily, oposed to it being some calculated plan? Absolutely as well. Does every single one of their members at the end of the day sleep well at night and well-fed in multi-million dollar homes? That is also true, which you positively cannot say about most members of SAG and the WGA. 

I do not see how the WGA and SAG can win this if the AMPTP stays united. A strike is supposed to be a self-harming practice in order to harm the other party as well, but the longer the strike goes on, the more obvious it seems that the WGA and SAG are harming themselves more than they are actually harming the studios. It's like they're biting them with all they have and destroying their mouths in the process while at most leaving some bite marks in the studio's necks instead of actually harming them proportionately.

If no movement is made on the next 6 weeks (probably in the form of some studio doing some movement to break away from the AMPTP if it's even possible, which is clearly what the WGA is desperate for someone in the AMPTP to do) I think it'd be more than advisable for both unions to present proposals in which they actually compromise significantly more and strip away more of their armor.  It sucks, and it shouldn't be that way, but if it lasts that long it'd come to that eventually, so they might as well do it sooner rather than letting their members starve for many more months. 

I remember that when that Deadline article came out many WGA and SAG members were accusing execs of bluffing over the "losing their houses" bit; it is now clear they were not bluffing. And it was perhaps a mistake for both unions to think they were.

Edited September 12, 2023 by 21C

[Kon]

4 hours ago, Plain Old Tele said:

Putting aside company stock numbers, they’re just flat out losing money. 
 

WB alone lost 300-500m over the summer (their numbers). The cost of agreeing to the WGA’s asks is in the 430m range, for three years. One studio alone has already neared that total.
 

And this while they still had some new movies being released. They’ll still have movies coming out through the end of the year, but then things get pretty thin for them. And features take awhile to get made. On the TV side, they’ve already lost essentially a whole season of advertising. 

 

The longer this goes on, the more catastrophic the revenue loss will be. 

 

However, the studios aren't only considering the cost of agreeing with WGA and SAG.

 

They consider the message conveyed by agreeing to give them a fair payment. If AMPTP accept pretty easily, other guilds would likely make strikes for fair payment too.

 

Therefore, it is convenient for studios to show how long, difficult and risky it is for the guild members to achieve their demands.

Edited September 12, 2023 by Kon

[Jonwo]

Let's be real, you're not going to see every single CEO fired because of the WGA/SAG strike. In the case of Apple and even Disney, scripted content is only a fraction of their revenue

[FunkMiller]

2 hours ago, 21C said:

A headache is way, waaaay different than straight-up losing your house and barely having any money to afford food, which is the situation many WGA and SAG members already find themselves in and will find themselves in, in the coming months. 

 

Do you honestly think some writers weren't facing this kind of thing before the strikes started? It's the whole reason for them to be happening in the first place

 

If anything, it seems to me like there are funds out there that are supporting the writers who would otherwise be in extreme financial jeopardy if the strikes hadn't happened.

 

Every day that goes by does not make the writers weaker. They were as weak as they could possibly be before the strikes started.

 

We've reached the point now where I think the writers would rather see the whole thing collapse, rather than continue with the terrible terms they've been offered. And I think the financial support will continue to grow from people who also see how awful the studio's attitude is.

Edited September 12, 2023 by FunkMiller

[filmlover]

Jennifer Hudson Show, ‘The Talk’ Resuming Amid Strikes – The Hollywood Reporter

[Jonwo]

Just now, filmlover said:

Jennifer Hudson Show, ‘The Talk’ Resuming Amid Strikes – The Hollywood Reporter

This is why people piling on Drew Barrymore are looking stupid. Literally every daytime show is resuming. 

[BoxOfficeFangrl]

 

The article summarizes the different daytime talk shows and their WGA status.

 

Never Had WGA Writers

Live! With Kelly and Mark

Tamron Hall

Sherri

 

WGA Covered Shows

The View (never stopped production)

The Drew Barrymore Show

The Jennifer Hudson Show (resumes filming this week)

The Talk (shut down in May, returning 9/18)

The Kelly Clarkson Show (shut down in May, moved production to NY, but no announced return date)

 

 

 

 

Edited September 12, 2023 by BoxOfficeFangrl

[filmlover]

You just know that all these talk shows are now working overtime to book Tay Tay since she's been given the go-ahead to promote the concert film that's about to smash at the box office.

 

Probably Priscilla Presley too to discuss the new biopic about her life (if SAG-AFTRA allows them to continue promoting it beyond Venice I would expect Cailee Spaeny/Jacob Elordi to make some appearances as well).

[Jonwo]

I've noticed that in the UK, the British shows commissioned by Netflix such as Who is Erin Carter have been allowed to promote their shows so I assume those are under British Equity contracts. 

 

One things that the New York based shows can use actors doing Broadway shows as the SAG strike doesn't cover them since that's American Equity and they have the likes of Danny DeVito, Daniel Radcliffe, Jonathan Groff etc of course they can not appear out if solidarity but they're not forbidden. Eric McCormack was promoting The Cottage on GMA3 and Morning Joe and no one bat an eyelid.

Edited September 12, 2023 by Jonwo

[WittyUsername]

I seriously doubt that anyone ever thought these strikes would end with all these CEO’s getting punished. You’d have to be incredibly naive to think that. 

[Jonwo]

13 minutes ago, WittyUsername said:

I seriously doubt that anyone ever thought these strikes would end with all these CEO’s getting punished. You’d have to be incredibly naive to think that. 

Mark Ruffalo wanted Hollywood to collapse and be replaced which is naive at best and stupid at worse.