Screen Actors Guild Preparing to Join Writers on Strike; What Impact Will it Have on Your Favorite Show?
More Hollywood productions could be shutting down this week, as the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) is preparing to go on strike. Unless a deal is reached by midnight Wednesday, Tinseltown’s most famous performers will join the Writers Guild of America on picket lines.
The actors’ union is still negotiating with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), which represents major studios in the talks. But it’s not looking good; one producer told Variety this week that “it would be a miracle at this point” for the two sides to reach an agreement before the deadline. The AMPTP made a last-minute request for mediation from the federal government, to which the actors reluctantly agreed Tuesday night, while stating bluntly that 11:59 p.m. ET Wednesday night was still their deadline.
“We are not confident that the employers have any intention of bargaining toward an agreement,” SAG-AFTRA said in a statement regarding mediation.
The outstanding issues between performers and producers are essentially the same sticking points that caused the writers to walk out. Actors want a raise, as well as better residual payments from shows on streaming and high guardrails against the intrusion of AI into the entertainment business. Without these last, stars fear that their images may be used by studios to do who knows what onscreen.
“There seems to be no real negotiations here,” one SAG-AFTRA member told Deadline regarding AI use in Hollywood. “Actors see ‘Black Mirror’’s ‘Joan Is Awful’ [episode] as a documentary of the future, with their likenesses sold off and used any way producers and studios want. We want a solid pathway. The studios countered with ‘trust us’ – we don’t.”
Streaming services like Netflix have their share of blame to take in this growing fiasco for producers. Streamers have made previous residual deals wildly out-of-date, as formulas for residual payments in the last contract from studios did not factor in the millions, sometimes billions of hours of playtime a show might see on a streaming platform.
If performers do walk off of sets this week, it will be the first time in more than 60 years that the guild is on strike at the same time as the writers. Productions that are still ongoing would stop completely; producers were still free to make shows that had already been written when the writers’ strike hit, but they’ll have a hard time completing shows without writers or actors.
If your favorite show is currently producing a new season’s worth of episodes in the United States, it will almost certainly grind to a halt if SAG-AFTRA goes on strike. According to Variety, leadership from the union spoke with talent representation agencies earlier this week, giving them guidelines on what kind of promotional obligations outside the United States would be allowed if actors did strike. You won’t see much of your most beloved movie and TV stars if the guild walks out; promoting series and movies filmed before the strike took effect will be forbidden for SAG-AFTRA members, at least domestically.
That might be a big blow to producers’ pocketbooks, especially as blockbuster movies like “Barbie,” “Oppenheimer” and “Mission: Impossible Dead Reckoning- Part 1” are set to arrive in theaters. Without stars like Margot Robbie, Tom Cruise, and Cillian Murhpy to promote these movies, their box office performance could easily suffer.
For audiences, this is yet another exasperating step in the wrong direction. Studios will eventually run out of already-produced content to release sooner or later, and it’s highly unlikely the writers or actors will cave before then. That puts the onus on the AMPTP to give in to some of the demands these unions are making, and the faster it does that, the faster Hollywood will get back to the business of entertainment.