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Writers' strike update: Moody's estimate for settling the strike [1]

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Date: 2023-08-02

The members of the Writers Guild of America (WGA) are still on strike. The members of SAG-AFTRA joined the strike fairly recently. The studios are meeting with the WGA in two days. It’ll be their first meeting since the strike began. Charles Pulliam-Moore for The Verge:

Though it won’t necessarily lead to an immediate end to Hollywood’s ongoing writing strike, the Writers Guild of America and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers [(AMPTP)] are scheduled to have a meeting this Friday — their first since the strike began three months ago. Variety reports that WGA chief negotiator Ellen Stutzman has agreed to meet with AMPTP president Carol Lombardini this Friday in response to a direct request from the AMPTP head to discuss next steps that could lead to labor contract negotiations resuming. In a statement shared to its members on Tuesday evening, the WGA confirmed that Lombardini and Stutzman are set to speak and stressed the importance of paying attention to the union’s official channels.

Meanwhile, there are no plans for the studios to meet with SAG-AFTRA any time soon.

Has anyone thought about just giving the writers and actors everything they demand? The analysts at Moody’s Investors Service have thought about it, and they have crunched the numbers. John Lafayette for Next TV:

“Production in the U.S. has halted at a time when the sector is under pressure to mitigate the secular decline in linear TV and show it can operate streaming platforms at a profit to mitigate linear decay,” Moody’s said. “We estimate the newly ratified Directors Guild of America (DGA) agreement, together with potential new WGA and SAG-AFTRA contracts, will ultimately cost Moody's-rated media companies $450 million to $600 million more per year.”

Aw, the poor studios are suffering declines in revenues! But, as Steve Shives points out in a video from last week, declining revenue is not the same as no revenues at all. I started watching Shives for his videos about Star Trek, but he also does videos about more general topics, like this one.

x YouTube Video

There are plenty of quibbles to be made with his $14.6 billion estimate for the revenues of the five major studios plus Netflix, I’m sure, but none of those quibbles take away from Shives’s thesis here: the studios still have lots of money, and giving the writers and actors everything they’re demanding would cost the studio executives pennies on the dollar.

Suppose that you’re paying someone 1¢ a month to do a certain task for you. Then they ask for 2¢ a month. I would pay that, and I believe so would you. Even though it would be a 200% increase, it’s still less than 1% of my income for the month. How much less, I don’t want to say. On my worst months, I can still rub two or more cents together, literally.

But you and I don’t think like billionaires. A billionaire would rather hire a lawyer to intimidate the worker and keep paying the 1¢ rate. The unfortunate worker would probably capitulate rather than be ruined financially fighting anything in court.

I hope that the people who wind up editing artificial intelligence vomit unionize and demand to be paid what they deserve. Or better yet, I hope it doesn’t come to that.

Streaming residuals transparency is also at issue for both the actors and the writers. Take for example actor Jeffrey Combs. He was a major guest character on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (as Weyoun and Brunt, though usually not in the same episode) and Star Trek: Enterprise (as Shran), and he also had a one-off guest rôle on Star Trek: Voyager.

It’s easy for Combs to check when his Star Trek episodes run on the Heroes & Icons digital TV channel. He’s got a Weyoun episode and a Brunt episode coming up in a couple of weeks. If he looks at H & I’s Deep Space Nine page, he would see that he’s not in tonight’s rerun, “Return to Grace,” but his friend Marc Alaimo is (Alaimo played the villain Gul Dukat). I think Casey Biggs (who played Dukat’s right hand man Damar) is also in that one…

Now suppose that a bunch of people spread out throughout the country decided to stream all of Combs’s Shran episodes this weekend in a streaming “watch party” through Paramount+. Would Paramount+ tell Combs about it, and calculate the appropriate residuals? Maybe, maybe not, he just has to take the company’s word that they did.

P.S. Shives also has a video about history teaching standards in Florida. I’m not sure if it’s funny because it’s real or if it’s not funny because it’s too real.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/8/2/2184720/-Writers-strike-update-Moody-s-estimate-for-settling-the-strike

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