The actors’ strike is over, Hollywood starts again

After 118 days of picketing, the union representing actors says it has reached a tentative agreement on a new contract, marking an end to the paralysis that has plagued Hollywood for months. SAG-AFTRA announced that it voted unanimously to approve a new contract with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers and that the strike officially ended at one minute past midnight last night.

In an email sent to its members Wednesday evening, the SAG-AFTRA negotiating committee said the new contract “will allow SAG-AFTRA members in every category to build sustainable careers.” SAG-AFTRA, which said the deal is worth more than $1 billion, told members: “We have reached an extraordinary agreement that includes above-average minimum pay increases, unprecedented consensus and pay measures that will protect members from the threat of AI and which for the first time establishes an allowance for participation in streaming”. The union will release full details of the provisional agreement after it sends it to its national council for review next Friday. Members will then have the opportunity to vote on whether to ratify the contract.

“Today’s tentative agreement represents a new paradigm,” AMPTP said in the statement released Wednesday evening, “and offers SAG-AFTRA the largest contract-to-contract gains in the union’s history, including the largest raise of minimum wages for forty years now, a brand new residual right for streaming programs, extensive guarantees in terms of consent and remuneration in case of use of artificial intelligence and significant contractual improvements on all the points in question. AMPTP is pleased to have reached a provisional agreement and looks forward to the industry getting back to telling great stories.”

The return of actors to work means that production can resume, restarting the content machines that have been dormant for almost six months. The actors began striking on July 14, joining the Writers Guild of America, which had already been striking for more than two months. At the time, SAG-AFTRA was unable to reach agreement with AMPTP on key issues such as increased pay, residual streaming rights, and AI, resulting in rhetoric that escalated over the course of the spring and summer. is increasingly polarized.

“The level of their expectations is simply unrealistic,” the Disney CEO said Bob Iger about the writers and actors the day after talks between the production companies and SAG-AFTRA broke down. «The challenges that this sector is already facing are increasing and which, frankly speaking, are truly unprecedented». The president of SAG-AFTRA, Fran Drescher, thought differently. In fact, on the first day of the strike, you stated: «We are victims of a very greedy entity», claiming that during the negotiations the studios and streamers represented by AMPTP cite lack of funding as an excuse while “giving hundreds of millions of dollars to their CEOs. That’s disgusting. Shame on them. They are on the wrong side of history right now.”

The actors’ strike elevated Drescher to an unprecedented public role: that of union leader. Although she was criticized for going to a Dolce & Gabbana promotional event in Italy just days before her SAG-AFTRA contract expired, she is the actress previously best known for playing The nanny he approached his new role with such passion that even the Saturday Night Live he couldn’t help but parody it in a recent sketch. Meanwhile, over the summer, as protesters brandished signs rebuking studio executives, Iger, the CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery David Zaslav and some other CEOs found themselves in the role of villains.

The double strike has thrown the entertainment industry into disarray, leading many productions to close, canceling awards shows, forcing studios to postpone successful films rather than release them without the actors there to promote them and leaving thousands of crew members out of work. It was the first time since 1960 that both unions had gone on strike, and the shockwaves from this disruption spread beyond Hollywood: the production halt is estimated to have cost the California economy $5 billion.

When the writers’ strike ended on September 24, many in the industry took it for granted that actors would soon do the same. On October 2, SAG-AFTRA and AMPTP resumed talks (in the presence of high-level officials such as Iger and Ted Sarandos, one of Netflix’s CEOs) only to quickly reach a stalemate. On October 11, AMPTP released a statement saying that “talks are no longer progressing in a productive direction.” At the Bloomberg Screentime conference, Sarandos himself told an audience of Hollywood professionals that one of SAG-AFTRA’s proposals (that streamers pay a fixed fee per subscriber as a sort of compensation for actors) had become “pushed too far”. SAG-AFTRA leaders took issue with AMPTP’s characterization of the fee as a “tax” on streamers.

The talks resumed in a more intense way on October 24, against the backdrop of an increasingly panicked Hollywood. “This year is gone,” she declared earlier this month Vanity Fair a film and television producer. An important talent agent he was already thinking with concern about 2024: «The only way to save the year is to resolve the strike before the end of 2023, so as to protect at least part of next year». Apparently, some of SAG-AFTRA’s most famous members (including George Clooney, Ben Affleck, Jennifer Aniston And Tyler Perry) would hold Zoom meetings with union leaders to decide how to resume negotiations. A group of prominent names even proposed abolishing the $1 million cap on dues to help pay lower-income actors (a proposal that, as Drescher later explained, would violate federal labor laws ).

After the talks resumed, hundreds of SAG-AFTRA members (including Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Paul Walter Hauser, Timothy Olyphant And Maya Hawke) signed an open letter addressed to the negotiating committee which said: «We prefer to continue the strike rather than accept an unfavorable agreement».

Towards the end of October, negotiations appeared to be picking up steam, as negotiators spent much of the weekend before Halloween working behind closed doors. On Sunday evening, SAG-AFTRA tweeted that it had “discussed with AMPTP all proposals on the table, including AI,” and asked members to “fill the picket line” to make their voices heard. But the talks continued to drag on as the two sides remained at odds on key issues, particularly the protection of actors when AI is used. On Tuesday evening, SAG-AFTRA said it took 10 hours to deliberate that day and thanked its members for “your patience and support as we finish our work.”

In its email Wednesday evening, SAG-AFTRA thanked other Hollywood unions for their support during the strike and expressed gratitude to the approximately 160,000 union members who have been on the picket lines for nearly four months. “Thank you all for your dedication, commitment and solidarity throughout the strike,” the negotiating committee wrote. «It is thanks to YOU ​​that this progress has been possible».