Hollywood Actors StrikeTV and Movie Actors Vote for Biggest Walkout in Four Decades
Leaders of the Hollywood union SAG-AFTRA, representing 160,000 television and movie actors, voted to strike on Thursday. Screenwriters have already been picketing for over 70 days.
Brooks Barnes, John Koblin and
transcript
Hollywood Actors Vote to Strike
About 160,000 television and movie actors will join screenwriters who walked off the job in May, setting off the first industrywide shutdown in 63 years.
“I cannot believe it, quite frankly, how far apart we are on so many things. How they plead poverty. That they’re losing money left and right when giving hundreds of millions of dollars to their C.E.O.s. It is disgusting. Shame on them.” “The strike will begin at midnight tonight. And all of us union members, leadership and staff, will be out on the picket lines tomorrow morning.” “One day longer.” “One day stronger.” “One day longer.” “One day stronger.” “The jig is up, A.M.P.T.P. We stand tall. You have to wake up and smell the coffee. We are labor and we stand tall, and we demand respect and to be honored for our contribution. You share the wealth because you cannot exist without us.”
The Hollywood actors’ union approved a strike on Thursday for the first time in 43 years, bringing the $134 billion American movie and television business to a halt over anger about pay and fears of a tech-dominated future.
The leaders of SAG-AFTRA, the union representing 160,000 television and movie actors, announced the strike after negotiations with studios over a new contract collapsed, with streaming services and artificial intelligence at the center of the standoff. On Friday, the actors will join screenwriters, who walked off the job in May, on picket lines in New York, Los Angeles and the dozens of other American cities where scripted shows and movies are made.
Actors and screenwriters had not been on strike at the same time since 1960, when Marilyn Monroe was still starring in films and Ronald Reagan was the head of the actors’ union. Dual strikes pit more than 170,000 workers against old-line studios like Disney, Universal, Sony and Paramount, as well tech juggernauts like Netflix, Amazon and Apple.
“I am shocked by the way the people that we have been in business with are treating us!” Fran Drescher, the president of SAG-AFTRA, as the actors’ union is known, said at a news conference on Thursday in Los Angeles. “How far apart we are on so many things. How they plead poverty, that they’re losing money left and right when giving hundreds of millions of dollars to their C.E.O.s. It is disgusting. Shame on them!”
Shaking her fists in anger, Ms. Drescher noted that “the entire business model has been changed” by streaming and that artificial intelligence would soon change it more. “This is a moment in history — a moment of truth,” she said. “At some point, you have to say, ‘No, we’re not going to take this anymore.’”
Many of the actors’ demands mirror those of the writers, who belong to the Writers Guild of America. Both unions say they are trying to ensure living wages for workaday members, in particular those making movies or television shows for streaming services.
Screenwriters are afraid studios will use A.I. to generate scripts. Actors worry that the technology could be used to create digital replicas of their likenesses (or that performances could be digitally altered) without payment or approval.
The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which bargains on behalf of Hollywood companies, said it had worked to reach a reasonable deal at a difficult time for an industry upended by the streaming revolution, which the pandemic sped up.
“The union has regrettably chosen a path that will lead to financial hardship for countless thousands of people who depend on the industry,” the alliance said in a news release that outlined 14 areas where studios had offered “historic” contract improvements. Those included, according to the alliance, an 11 percent pay increase in the contract’s first year for background actors, stand-ins and photo doubles and a 76 percent increase in residual payments for “high-budget” shows that stream overseas.
The alliance added in a separate statement: “We are deeply disappointed that SAG-AFTRA has decided to walk away from negotiations. This is the union’s choice, not ours.”
Behind the scenes, studio executives responded to Ms. Drescher’s fury in varying ways. Some said they had underestimated her ability to lead the sometimes-fractious actors’ union — discounting her as little more than the cartoonish figure she played on “The Nanny” for six seasons in the 1990s. Others continued to mock her as giving an Academy Award-caliber performance at the union’s news conference.
Though Hollywood had been bracing for a writers’ strike since the beginning of the year — screenwriters have walked out eight times over the past seven decades, most recently in 2007 — the actors’ uncharacteristic resolve caught senior executives and producers off guard.
The actors last staged a major walkout in 1980, when the economic particulars of a still-nascent boom in home video rentals and sales was a sticking point. Their latest action is part of a resurgent labor movement, particularly in California, where hotel workers, school bus drivers, teachers and cafeteria staff have all gone on strike for some duration in recent months.
The first distress signal for the studios came in early June when roughly 65,000 members of the actors’ union voted to authorize a strike. Almost 98 percent of the voters supported the authorization, a figure that narrowly eclipsed the writers’ margin.
Still, studio negotiators went into the talks feeling optimistic. They were taken aback when they saw the list of proposals from the union — it totaled 48 pages, nearly triple the size of the list during their last negotiations in 2020, according to two people familiar with the proposals, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss confidential talks.
Then in late June, more than 1,000 actors, including Meryl Streep, John Leguizamo, Jennifer Lawrence, Constance Wu and Ben Stiller, signed a letter to guild leadership, declaring pointedly that “we are prepared to strike.”
The Hollywood studios will now need to navigate a two-front labor war with no modern playbook to consult. There are many open questions, including whether the actors and the writers may demand that future negotiations with the studios be conducted in tandem. One guild that will not be included: the Directors Guild of America, which ratified a contract last month.
The actors’ walkout will provide an immediate boon to the striking writers, who have been walking picket lines for more than 70 days; the Writers Guild has yet to return to bargaining with the studios. Now those picket lines are likely to be raucous and star-studded spectacles — struggling thespians still trying to get a foothold next to A-listers with bodyguards who are paid $20 million or more per movie role.
The strikes are the latest monumental blow to an entertainment industry that has been rocked in recent years by the pandemic and sweeping technological shifts.
The Hollywood studios have watched their share prices nose-dive and their profit margins shrink as viewership for cable and network television — as well as box office returns — has collapsed in the wake of the explosive growth of streaming entertainment.
Many companies have resorted to layoffs, as well as purging series from their streaming services, all in the name of trying to increase profit margins and satisfy recalcitrant investors. Studio executives had already put the brakes on ordering new television series last year as their streaming services continued to burn through cash.
In an interview on CNBC on Thursday morning, Disney’s chief executive, Robert A. Iger, said that given all the “disruptive forces” in the business, “this is worst time in the world to add to that disruption.”
Barry Diller, the veteran media executive, said in an interview that the recent upheaval in the industry had caused distress for both sides.
“You have a complete change in the underlying economics of the entertainment business that it previously held for certainly the last 50 years, if not the last 100 years,” he said. “Everything was basically in balance under the hegemony of five major studios, and then, oh, my God, along come the tech companies in Netflix, Amazon and Apple and the fast, transformative things that came out of Covid. The result of which is you have a business that’s just completely upended.”
After the strike announcement, the union issued rules for its members. Along with not being able to work in front of the camera, they will not be permitted to promote current projects. That includes attending Comic-Con, film festivals and movie premieres.
That means actors will not be able to promote movies during an all-important stretch for the summer box office, when big-budget films like “Barbie,” “Oppenheimer” and “Haunted Mansion” are released.
Some of those promotional opportunities have already disappeared: Late-night shows like “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” and “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” have been running only repeat episodes during the writers’ strike.
The effects of the dual strikes should be noticeable to viewers within a couple of months. Unless there is an immediate resolution to the labor disputes, the ABC fall schedule, for instance, will debut with nightly lineups of reality series and game shows — including “Celebrity Wheel of Fortune,” “Dancing With the Stars” and “Judge Steve Harvey” — as well as repeats of “Abbott Elementary.”
If the strikes drag into the fall, blockbuster films scheduled to be released next summer, like “Deadpool 3,” could be delayed.
The actors’s strike has already begun to put a damper on the promotion of summer’s would-be blockbusters, and drawn fiery statements of support from movie stars.
The film “Oppenheimer” started its London premiere an hour earlier than planned on Thursday in order to allow its cast to walk the red carpet before any strike was called, and then, before the film was shown, its director, Christopher Nolan, announced that its stars had left the building in solidarity with their fellow actors.
“Unfortunately they’re off to write their picket signs for what we believe to be an imminent strike by SAG,” Mr. Nolan told the audience, referring to SAG-AFTRA, the union representing screen and television actors. Not long after that it became official: The union’s leaders announced that the strike would begin at midnight.
Matt Damon had telegraphed the possibility that the strike could cause a cast exodus, telling Variety from the premiere’s red carpet that “the second it’s called, we’re going home.”
“This isn’t an academic exercise,” he said. “This is real life and death stuff. Hopefully we get to a resolution quickly. No one wants a work stoppage, but we’ve got to get a fair deal.”
The strike also came up at another major London premiere, Wednesday night’s star-studded screening of “Barbie,” when its star, Margot Robbie, told Sky News that she was “very much in support of all the unions” and would “absolutely” support the strike.
The strike will halt red carpet appearances and other promotional activities, but will add a dose of star power to the unions seeking a better deal from the studios. Several took to social media.
Yvette Nicole Brown, who only a day earlier had announced the Emmy Award nominations, posted a picture of herself holding a “SAG-AFTRA On Strike” sign on Instagram.
And the actor Cynthia Nixon wrote on Twitter that she was proud to stand with writers to “demand a fair share of the record-breaking profits the studios have been reaping from our labor for far too long.”
The @sagaftra strike has at last arrived. I am proud to be standing tall with the @WGAWest and @WGAEast as actors and writers together demand a fair share of the record-breaking profits the studios have been reaping from our labor for far too long.
— Cynthia Nixon (@CynthiaNixon) July 13, 2023
We will win this! ✊🏻🔥🔥🔥✊🏻
Jack Quaid, who was in “Scream,” wrote on Twitter, “If we must strike… THEN WE SHALL STRIIIIIIIIKEEEEEEEEE!!!!!”
Some actors, like Kumail Nanjiani, who was nominated for an Emmy this week for his performance in “Welcome to Chippendales,” posted the strike placard on social media.
— Kumail Nanjiani (@kumailn) July 13, 2023
And several, including Josh Gad, the voice of Olaf in the “Frozen” movies, praised the impassioned news conference by Fran Drescher, SAG-AFTRA’s president.
Very proud and impressed by @sagaftra and @frandrescher right now at this presser. July 13, 2023
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Entertainment reporter
In July 1980, members of the Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Radio and Television Artists were so fearful of what was to become of their jobs with the advent of pay television and other new “home video technologies” that they left their sets and hit the picket lines.
Sound stages fell silent. Production on “9 to 5” stopped. “Little House on the Prairie” shut down.
The unions were seeking a 40 percent increase in pay over three years. They also wanted a percentage of the profits when their work was licensed to pay television or home video. The studios were reluctant to share, fearful that the profits from the new home video markets would be too small to divide up and that putting too many resources into those markets would adversely affect theatrical attendance.
An agreement was struck between the studios and the unions at the end of that September and ratified at the end of October. But during those three months the networks were forced to delay the start of their fall television programming.
The 32nd Primetime Emmy Awards ceremony was also boycotted by the actors. (Powers Boothe was the only actor to show, for his role in the mini-series “Guyana Tragedy: The Story of Jim Jones.”).
The industry lost an estimated $40 million a week, and shows without union actors, like Carl Sagan’s “Cosmos: A Personal Voyage,” gained popularity.
In the end, the actors received a 32.5 percent increase in pay and a 30 percent increase in residuals. They also secured a health and pension plan, a fact brought up at the news conference on Thursday announcing SAG-AFTRA’s new strike by Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, the union’s chief negotiator.
“This is not a strike-happy union,” he said. “This is a union that views strikes as a last resort, but we’re not afraid to do them when that’s what it takes to make sure our members received a fair contract.”
When the strike officially begins at 12:01 a.m. Pacific time on Friday, the 160,000 television and movie actors represented by the SAG-AFTRA union will be barred from a wide-ranging list of activities: acting in films, promoting them at premieres and many other related activities.
According to a statement sent by the SAG-AFTRA National Board to all union members, members will be prohibited from the following on-camera work:
Acting
Singing
Dancing
Performing stunts
Piloting on-camera aircraft
Puppeteering
Performance capture or motion capture
They will also be prohibited from certain kinds of off-camera work, including voice acting, narration and stunt coordinating. And union members will be forbidden from engaging in promotional activities called for by their contracts, including:
Tours
Personal appearances
Interviews
Conventions
Fan expos
Festivals
For your consideration events
Panels
Premieres/screenings
Award shows
Junkets
Podcast appearances
Social media
Studio showcases
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Fran Drescher was vibrating with anger when she stepped to the microphone.
“We are the victims here,” Ms. Drescher, the star of the 1990s sitcom “The Nanny” and the president of SAG-AFTRA, said. “We are being victimized by a very greedy entity.”
She and Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, the union’s chief negotiator, appeared at the organization’s Los Angeles headquarters to announce that its roughly 160,000 members would be on strike as of midnight. She criticized the Hollywood studios the union had been negotiating with and questioned the pay packages they have bestowed on top executives.
“I am shocked by the way the people that we have been in business with are treating us,” Ms. Drescher said. “I cannot believe it, quite frankly.”
A major issue for the actors is how they are paid for their work that appears on streaming services.
“This business model has been changed, but the companies want to just keep our members locked in a contract that doesn’t reflect that change,” Mr. Crabtree-Ireland said, adding that he and Ms. Drescher spoke individually with many of the chief executives of the studios on Wednesday night.
In a statement, the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers reiterated some of the offers it had made to the union, saying they included “historic pay and residual increases.”
“A strike is certainly not the outcome we hoped for as studios cannot operate without the performers that bring our TV shows and films to life,” it said. “The union has regrettably chosen a path that will lead to financial hardship for countless thousands of people who depend on the industry.
Ms. Drescher was particularly irate over the studios’ assertion that the union walked away from a historic offer. “The industry that we once knew — when I did ‘The Nanny’ — everybody was part of the gravy train,” she said. “Now it’s a walled-in vacuum.”
Mr. Crabtree-Ireland specifically took issue with the assertion by the A.M.P.T.P., which bargains on behalf of Hollywood companies, that it had made a “groundbreaking AI proposal which protects performers’ digital likenesses.”
As for when the two parties will resume negotiations, Ms. Drescher said that depended on the studios.
“We are open to talking to them tonight,” she said. “But all of this is because of their behavior. It’s up to them if they are willing to talk in a normal way that honors what we do.”
Ms. Drescher and Mr. Crabtree-Ireland were soon joined by members of the negotiating committee, who stood behind them dressed in union T-shirts. They held up their arms, evoking the union organizing character played by Sally Field in the film “Norma Rae,” for a photo at the end of the news conference.
Entertainment reporter
Disney was an also-ran studio in 1980, the last time actors staged a major walkout. The company made three movies on its own that year, the most notable of which, “Herbie Goes Bananas,” went kersplat at the box office.
Now, Disney ranks as Hollywood’s biggest producer of movies and TV shows — which is one reason Robert A. Iger, the company’s chief executive, has an outsize role in the negotiations (or lack thereof) with actors for a new contract. He sounded irritated on Thursday when asked in a CNBC interview about the likelihood that actors would join already-striking screenwriters on picket lines.
“It’s very disturbing to me,” Mr. Iger said in an interview on CNBC before the SAG-AFTRA union, representing 160,000 television and movie actors, voted to strike. “There’s a level of expectation that they have that is just not realistic and they are adding to a set of challenges that this business is already facing that is quite frankly very disruptive and dangerous.”
Mr. Iger added, “I understand any labor organization’s desire to work on the behalf of its members — to get, you know, the most compensation and to be compensated fairly based on the value that they deliver. But you also have to be realistic about the business environment and what this business can deliver.”
Disney owns seven movie factories (Pixar, Walt Disney Animation Studios, 20th Century, Searchlight, Marvel, Lucasfilm and the Disney live-action label) and makes at least 150 television shows, including series for FX, National Geographic and ABC.
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At the start of S.A.G’s news conference, the alliance representing the studios issued a statement and a list of 14 proposals it offered to the actors. The proposals varied from what the alliance called “the highest percentage increase in minimums in 35 years” and a 76 percent increase in foreign residuals for high-budget streaming programming, to limits on self-tape requests and what they called a “groundbreaking AI proposal which protects performers’ digital likenesses.”
Entertainment reporter
“A strike is certainly not the outcome we hoped for as studios cannot operate without the performers that bring our TV shows and films to life,” the alliance said. “The Union has regrettably chosen a path that will lead to financial hardship for countless thousands of people who depend on the industry.”
Fran Drescher, the owner of a distinct Queens-inflected accent familiar to television audiences from her star turn on “The Nanny,” the CBS sitcom from the 1990s, has now become the face of the actors’ strike.
Ms. Drescher is the president of SAG-AFTRA, the union that represents tens of thousands of screen actors. It’s a position previously held by people like Ronald Reagan, Patty Duke and Charlton Heston.
“The eyes of the world and, particularly, the eyes of labor are upon us,” Ms. Drescher said at a news conference in Los Angeles on Thursday while announcing the strike. “What happens to us is important. What’s happening to us is happening across all fields of labor.”
Shaking her fists in indignation, she continued, “I am shocked by the way the people that we have been in business with are treating us!”
Ms. Drescher’s role presiding over the strike — actors will now join more than 11,000 screenwriters who have already been on picket lines for more than two months — amounts to a surprising plot twist in her long career.
She will also now be one of the primary voices of a resurgent national labor movement. How she handles it could help determine the fate of about 160,000 actors in the coming weeks.
Ms. Drescher, 65, a cancer survivor who has described herself as leading an “unconventional life,” most recently starred in “Indebted,” a sitcom for NBC that lasted 12 episodes before it was canceled in 2020.
She has long expressed concerns about corporate greed, captioning photos with slogans like “STOP CAPITALIST GREED NOW.” It was enough for New York Magazine to headline a 2017 story, “Your New Favorite Anti-Capitalist Icon Is Fran Drescher.”
A few years later, in 2021, Ms. Drescher won election to the guild presidency in a deeply contested race versus the actor Matthew Modine.
Media reporter
The Writers Guild of America, the screenwriters union, just emailed its members, saying that the Hollywood studios have “proven unwilling to meet the justifiable demands of actors and writers at the bargaining table” and that it supports SAG-AFTRA members as they begin their work stoppage. “The last time both of our unions struck at the same time,” the email said, “actors and writers won landmark provisions that we all continue to benefit from today — residuals and pension and health funds.”
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Dozens of writers and actors picketed outside of Warner Bros. Discovery headquarters in New York City on Thursday afternoon, unified in their concerns about low residual payments and job displacement from artificial intelligence.
As Hollywood braced for its first industrywide shutdown in 63 years, organizers from the Writers Guild of America and the actors’ union, SAG-AFTRA, passed out water and burritos to those who marched in the nearly 90-degree heat. Vehicles driving past the demonstration, at Park Avenue and 19th Street, often honked in support of the workers.
The picketers were mainly Writers Guild members, though SAG-AFTRA had set up a table in solidarity as that union prepared for the strike, which was approved in a vote on Thursday afternoon.
Carrie Gibson, a SAG-AFTRA member for 20 years, said she was particularly concerned about the studios’ refusal to guarantee that they would not use A.I. to replace actors.
Like writers, actors also rely on residual payments between shoots. Ms. Gibson said that she’d had a “a pretty good streak going” with roles in the HBO show “Barry” and the movie “King Richard,” but that opportunities started to diminish when screenwriters started picketing over 70 days ago. At this point, she said, closing down Hollywood is the only option left.
“It’s got to happen,” Ms. Gibson said. “It’s the only power we have.”
Because of the long-running writers strike, studios were already going to begin running out of scripts in the coming weeks or months. But now that the actors will be going on strike, no one is available to shoot.
“Everything has to stop,” said Lisa Takeuchi Cullen, vice president of film, television and streaming for the W.G.A. “We know that the studios were feeling the pressure already and this will only increase it.”
Media reporter
For more than two months, viewers have been without new episodes of late-night shows like “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert,” “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” and “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” because of the writers strike.
With the actors now voting to strike too, viewers are likely to notice the effects of the dual walkouts more broadly within the next couple of months.
Unless there is an immediate resolution to the labor disputes, the fall television lineup is almost certain to be affected. Instead of new episodes of “Grey’s Anatomy” or “Abbott Elementary,” the ABC fall lineup in September will be populated by a combination of reality series, game shows and reruns. That means lots of episodes of “Celebrity Wheel of Fortune,” “Dancing With the Stars” and “Judge Steve Harvey.”
Likewise, the Fox broadcast network announced its fall lineup on Wednesday, and it is packed with unscripted series like “Celebrity Name That Tune,” “The Masked Singer,” “Kitchen Nightmares” and “Snake Oil,” a new game show hosted by David Spade.
Though many productions have shut down since the writers went on strike on May 2, some filming continued for films and TV series that had completed scripts. One prominent talent agent who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly said that the writers’ strike had effectively shut down 80 percent of the scripted industry — and the actors’ strike will ground it entirely.
For premium cable networks and streaming services, the longer the disputes drag on, the bigger the effect there will be next year. Casey Bloys, the chairman of HBO, told Variety on Wednesday that “at least through the end of 2023, we’re OK. And then into 2024, it starts to get dicier.”
If the strikes drag into the fall, blockbuster films scheduled to be released next summer, like “Deadpool 3,” could also be delayed.
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The union said that the strike means that any Emmy campaigning by actors will immediately end.
Entertainment reporter
“The eyes of the world and, particularly, the eyes of labor are upon us,” Fran Drescher, the president of SAG-AFTRA, said. “What happens to us is important. What’s happening to us is happening across all fields of labor. When employers make Wall Street and greed their priority and they forget about the essential contributors who make the machine run, we have a problem.”
transcript
‘Shame On Them’: Fran Drescher Admonishes Studios
Fran Drescher, the president of SAG-AFTRA, and other leaders of the union, voted to strike.
I am shocked by the way the people that we have been in business with are treating us. I cannot believe it, quite frankly. How far apart we are on so many things. How they plead poverty. That they’re losing money left and right when giving hundreds of millions of dollars to their C.E.O.s. It is disgusting. Shame on them.
Entertainment reporter
Drescher shook her fists during an angry screed against studios. While her partner at the union, Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, the chief negotiator, spoke from a teleprompter, she spoke off the cuff. “Wake up and smell the coffee!” she said. “We demand respect! You cannot exist without us!”
Entertainment reporter
The strike is set to begin at midnight. The actors will be on the picket line on Friday.
The actors have voted to strike, said Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, the national executive director and chief negotiator of SAG-AFTRA.
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The cast of the film “Oppenheimer” walked out of the film’s London premiere on Thursday in solidarity with what appeared to be an imminent actors’ strike, the film’s director, Christopher Nolan, reportedly told the audience.
Entertainment reporter
At SAG-AFTRA headquarters near the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles, more than 20 TV cameras are awaiting a news conference by Fran Drescher and her actors’ union compatriots. Another 50 reporters are camped out with laptops, with more arriving by the minute. Upbeat union workers are handing out yogurt cups with fruit and frosted cupcakes with sprinkles.
Reporting from Los Angeles
On a writers’ picket line outside Paramount Pictures Studios in Hollywood, striking writers were enthusiastic about the possibility the actors’ union could soon join them. Rachel Alter, a strike captain, said that the last time the two unions joined forces, they made a powerful negotiating team. Scott Moore, a screenwriter known for “The Hangover” and “Bad Moms,” said: “People like pretty faces. Actors will be better looking than writers, and we might get more attention.”
Media reporter
The Hollywood writers and actors in contract disputes with the studios have argued that this is an existential moment for them and their professions. Many studio executives would say the same about their business.
The studios have watched their share prices nosedive and their profit margins shrink as viewership for cable and network television — as well as box office returns — have collapsed as streaming entertainment has exploded in popularity.
For several years, Wall Street rewarded media companies for investing lavishly in their new streaming services, and chasing subscribers at any cost. But last year, after Netflix lost subscribers for the first time in a decade, investors began souring on that philosophy and demanded that entertainment companies make their cash-bleeding streaming services profitable in a hurry.
Many companies — including Warner Bros. Discovery, Disney, Netflix and Paramount — have resorted to rounds of layoffs over the past year. Several companies have also purged original series from their streaming services, all in the name of attempting to increase profit margins. Studio executives also put the brakes on ordering new television series last year to try to rein in costs.
In an interview on CNBC on Thursday morning, Disney’s chief executive, Robert A. Iger, said that given all the “disruptive forces” in the business, this was “the worst time in the world to add to that disruption.”
The striking writers have not been sympathetic to the studio’s recent profitability woes. Chris Keyser, a chair of the writers’ union’s negotiating committee, pointed out in an interview earlier this year that Netflix is already profitable, and that rival companies have said their streaming services will be profitable in the next year or two. “We don’t get to negotiate again until 2026,” Mr. Keyser said. “We’re not waiting around until they’re profitable.”
Barry Diller, the veteran entertainment executive, said in an interview that the rise of streaming entertainment has shaken up a business that successfully worked for the studios for decades.
“You have a complete change in the underlying economics of the entertainment business that it previously held for certainly the last 50 years, if not the last 100 years,” he said. “Everything was basically in balance under the hegemony of five major studios, and then, oh, my God, along come the tech companies in Netflix, Amazon and Apple and the fast, transformative things that came out of Covid. The result of which is you have a business that’s just completely upended.”
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Some studios seem to be trying to show that it is business as usual. Paramount publicists just cheerfully served up a new clip from “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem,” set for release in theaters on Aug. 2. “Sneak preview and early access fan event!”
Like the striking writers, leaders of SAG-AFTRA, the actors’ union, have described their labor dispute in stark terms, calling the present moment “existential” for their members.
And like the writers, they have argued that this has rapidly approached a crisis because of how streaming entertainment has exploded over the last decade.
“We’re looking to make sure that acting can be a sustainable career choice for people, not just the 100 most famous celebrities in the world, but for the whole large population of our membership,” Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, the lead negotiator for the union, said in a recent interview. “They should be able to make a living and you know, pay a mortgage or pay rent like everybody else.”
The actors have raised a number of grievances, including the regulations on self-taped auditions, a pandemic phenomenon that has resulted in fewer live casting sessions.
But the core issues have been about compensation, as well as the use of artificial intelligence. The union has argued that actor compensation — particularly residuals, a type of royalty payment — has been “severely eroded” in recent years. In the old system, if a television series was a runaway hit, actors could expect significant residual checks to hit their bank account for years afterward. In the streaming era, the actors argue, the pie has gotten smaller, as have the checks.
“We’re fundamentally interested in making sure that our members share in the success of projects that they create,” Mr. Crabtree-Ireland said.
The actors also have grave concerns about artificial intelligence, and how the technology could be used to replicate their performances using their previous work without their being compensated or consulted.
Tara Kole, a lawyer with the entertainment law firm Johnson Shapiro Slewett & Kole, which represents actors like Emma Watson and Ashley Judd, said in an interview that the potential use of artificial intelligence was “terrifying” to actors.
“I think that’s become the intractable issue,” Ms. Kole said. “It feels existential and people don’t understand it. It’s new. It’s scary. Everyone is worried that all of a sudden they will be in a sequel to a movie and they are not getting paid for their work.”
Mr. Crabtree-Ireland, the lead negotiator, said of A.I., “We have a real vested interest in making sure that something significant is done about this, so that we’re not trying to fix it retroactively three years from now. It needs to be done now.”
In a statement, the Alliance of Motion Picture and the Television Producers, which bargains on behalf of the studios, said early Thursday morning that they offered “historic pay and residual increases,” and offered a “groundbreaking” A.I. proposal that “protects actors’ digital likeness.”
“Rather than continuing to negotiate, SAG-AFTRA has put us on a course that will deepen the financial hardship for thousands who depend on the industry for their livelihoods,” the studios said.