The Screen Actors Guild - American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) announced that it has reached a preliminary agreement with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) on a new three-year contract and announced that the strike was officially lifted at 12:01 am on November 9. This means that the 118-day strike by Hollywood actors and writers, which began in May this year, has finally pressed the stop button.
In this strike, "striving for streaming media and replay sharing" is one of the core issues in the negotiations. The Screen Actors Guild announced that the new contract will bring in more than $1 billion worth of funds for salary and benefit programs.
Union president Fran Drescher called it a "revolutionary agreement" that effectively increases minimum pay and streaming-share bonuses, raises caps on health care and pension funds, and for the first time regulates the use of AI technology to protect the rights of grassroots actors.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, some analysts estimate that the shutdown in California, where Hollywood is located, has cost at least $6 billion in the past few months.
However, the reporter looked at the financial reports of Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, Paramount Universal, Netflix and other companies found that in the third quarter of this year, the revenue, net profit, and net free cash flow of these four companies have increased by different margins. At the same time, the four companies' performance guidance for the fourth quarter also showed a trend of sequential growth.
The strike, which began in mid-July during the writers' strike, is the longest-running labor war in the history of the Screen Actors Guild. The union's demands for a higher minimum wage, a shared share of streaming revenue, and protection for extras from being replaced by "digital replicas" created by generative AI technology failed to align with the producers' alliance's desire to cut costs.
Previously, the Writers Guild of America general strike has ended, and reached a new agreement with the producers' union in terms of salary package, membership size, insurance contributions, and restrictions on the use of AI. In contrast, the progress of the strike agreement of the actors' union is slightly slow, foreign media news shows that a number of Hollywood frontline actors have come forward to coordinate the negotiations between the two sides, and take the initiative to pay more dues to reduce the gap between the demands of the two sides, hoping to end the economic impact of the strike on the entire film and television industry as soon as possible.
According to Variety, the minimum wage for most people will increase by 7%, which is 2% more than the WGA and the Directors Guild of America.
Now, the new three-year SAG contract puts an end to a series of strikes by both unions. "We are grateful that the entire industry is enthusiastically returning to work," a spokesman for the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers said in a statement. After the strike ended, actors were allowed to attend new releases and red carpet premieres again. It is worth noting that during the strike, the Emmy Awards ceremony has been postponed to January 2024, which means that next year will usher in a busy awards season with Emmys, Grammys, Screen actors Guild Awards and Oscars.
In addition, due to a series of strikes by the two major labor unions, major film and television companies have postponed the release of important films and called off the production of film and television programs, and many films, dramas, and variety shows have announced that they will postpone the restart of production until 2024.
After the end of the strike, due to the excessive stock of works in 2024, the production schedule is tight and the schedule is limited, some new scripted series originally scheduled to premiere in the fourth quarter of this year will also be changed to broadcast in 2024 to 2025, to get enough promotional warm-up time.
In the filmmaking sector in particular, the impact of the strike has triggered a snowballing chain reaction. According to a new report by Deadline, Marvel's Deadpool 3 will be pushed back from May 2024 to July, while Captain America: Brave New World, originally scheduled for July release, has been pushed back to February 14, 2025. In order to free up the release date, Blade's release date was moved from February 2025 to November 7 of that year. In addition, Marvel was unable to start production on Thunder due to the strike, and the film's release date will be changed from December 20, 2024, to July 25, 2025.
