The studios seem to have overplayed their hand, as now they have to contend with a second major Hollywood strike. The Screen Actors Guild (SAG-AFTRA) just went on strike as of Thursday, which was a move that instantly ground to a halt the parts of Hollywood that were not already ground to a halt by the WGA Writers Strike.
This involved such widely reported moments as actors Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt and Florence Pugh instantly walking out of their own Oppenheimer premiere in solidarity and compliance with the strike.
The only guild to have settled with studios has been the Directors Guild (DGA), but without actors and writers, that is essentially pointless. All of this has dramatically escalated with reveals like the fact that studios have proposed ideas like scanning background actors and using their likeness forever through AI, something that was quite literally the plot of a Black Mirror episode a month ago.
But the fever pitch was reached when unnamed studio executives were quoted in a Deadline piece saying that they could wait out the writers because they’d be unable to pay their rent or mortgages soon enough. Needless to say that did not go over well.
Previously, the Writers Strike meant that new scripts couldn’t be written, but many productions were still going forward if they already had been written, though a few stopped in solidarity all the same. But now with the Actors Strike as well, shows that were previously filming have now fully stopped. That leaves almost nothing left in production minus something like House of the Dragon which is made up of only UK actors that are legally not allowed to strike alongside the Americans.
While currently studios have a number of already-finished projects that are still going to be rolling out over the next few months, what happens after that is a complete void of content that is going to mean the entire industry simply has nothing to produce outside of reality TV. We saw this happen years ago which created a deeply bleak time for entertainment, but this is on a much larger scale. The WGA and SAG have not simultaneously been on strike since 1960. Yes, literally 73 years ago. Now, with 100x the media content compared to the 60s, this is about to get wild.
The main sticking points of the strike are A) the studios’ desire to use a whole bunch of AI tech in the future, including getting actors to sign over their likeness rights and B) the fact that moving from broadcast/theaters to the streaming era means that residuals are now barely being paid compared to what they were previously, as studios are just pocketing all that money (and yet, still losing money on streaming because of its high cost) and now they are actively removing shows from their platforms so they don’t have to pay any residuals. That’s created bizarre situations like the fact that the Emmy-nominated Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies is now not able to be watched legally, anywhere, after it was removed from Paramount+.
Absolutely everyone should be in support of the writers and actors here, even if it means we don’t get new seasons of shows or movies are delayed as a result. Hollywood has screwed things up here in the streaming era through sheer greed and bad investments, and they look to be making even worse decisions in the upcoming AI era. This is about to get very, very bad.
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