What Happened to Those Streaming Bonuses?
It was a key win of Hollywood’s 2023 double strikes: a bonus that promised to allow workers to share in some of the spoils of successful streaming series and movies.
After a grueling cumulative six-month work stoppage and talking points about entertainment workers falling behind, the Writers Guild and SAG-AFTRA — as well as, retroactively, the Directors Guild — wrote additional residuals beyond existing payments into their deals with media companies for top-rated projects. For WGA members, the new bonus structure, which took effect on Jan. 1, can range from $9,000 to $16,400 for a TV episode or $40,500 for a feature with a budget of more than $30 million, according to Hollywood payroll services firm Wrapbook. “We opened a new revenue stream,” said Fran Drescher of her union’s provision in November 2023. “What mattered was that we got into another pocket.”
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So now, after slightly more than a year with the bonus structure, are guild members reaping the rewards? So far the answer seems to be a qualified yes — even if not many projects appear to have made the cut and some quibble about the size of payments. Through the first half of 2024, a handful of original streaming shows and films have met the contractual threshold for bonus payments, and several more that premiered later in the year are likely to join them, guild representatives say.
Payments have begun to be disbursed, and guilds say media companies have turned over their data on time. When the deal was made, SAG-AFTRA claimed the streaming bonus would bring in up to $40 million a year in additional residuals for actors. They don’t have the receipts yet. Some union reps say it’s too early in the process to know how much these bonuses will yield for union members annually, as projects that premiered in the latter months of 2024 might not pay out bonuses until well into 2025.
“People who are receiving them appreciate the significant amount [of money] and that they are really a new source of income for this type of project,” says Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, SAG-AFTRA’s executive director and chief negotiator. “Having said that, I think it will take some time for people to get used to how it works.” WGA West president Meredith Stiehm echoes those sentiments and notes that she hasn’t heard of any issues related to media giants handing over their streaming data.
The streaming bonus in the WGA contract calls for all credited writers on a movie or series to be paid a 50 percent bonus above their fixed residual — totaling about $9,000 for a “high budget” streaming show if a writer is credited with both story and teleplay — if a season of a series or movie reaches the equivalent of 20 percent of a platform’s domestic subscribers during the project’s first 90 days of release. To determine whether a show or movie meets that threshold, the number of “views” (total viewing hours divided by run time) is divided by the number of subscribers to that platform, and if the result is above 0.2, the bonus kicks in. After the first 90 days of release, streamers have 60 days to report their data and pay bonuses to eligible projects. SAG-AFTRA and the DGA adopted the same formula for determining bonus payments.
None of the guild representatives The Hollywood Reporter spoke to would name specific projects that qualified for the bonus payments, citing confidentiality agreements with media companies regarding streaming data. Stiehm did note that the WGA had paid out bonuses to writers on projects from Netflix, Prime Video and Peacock as of early December. Netflix’s Avatar: The Last Airbender and Griselda are said to be among the projects that qualified for the bonus payments. Netflix and SAG-AFTRA declined to comment.
SAG-AFTRA has paid bonuses to actors on top shows from early in 2024 and is processing other payments, the union shared in December. But information has been thin on the ground regarding one of the curiosities of the SAG-AFTRA contract — a so-called “Robin Hood fund” that takes 25 percent of the pooled bonuses and earmarks them for distribution among a larger group of streaming performers, not just those on top shows.
The union’s relative silence on this major pillar of the strike-ending 2023 deal has prompted frustration and calls for answers. At least one union committee is pushing forward a resolution to share more information with members about the union’s streaming bonus. At a national board meeting in October, according to two people who were present, it was clear to attendees that the union had not yet sorted out how the 25 percent in bonus funds will be distributed more widely among streaming performers.
The odd union out in this story is the Directors Guild of America, which did not initially advocate for a streaming success payment in its 2023 negotiations. The union, known for doing exhaustive research prior to negotiations and taking a less confrontational approach with the studios, was instead focused on foreign residuals as an area of growth. “With respect to residuals, in the last round of negotiations, our priority was to address the global marketplace for programs that were made for SVOD. The problem we were trying to address was that the domestic market is largely saturated, and the growth is going to take place on exhibition outside the United States and Canada,” says a union representative.
The DGA did just that, negotiating a foreign streaming residuals structure predicated on the number of global subscribers; the union asserted that the change would result in a 76 percent increase in the foreign residual for top streaming services. (WGA and SAG-AFTRA also won this global subscriber-focused residual in their contracts, and leaders of both unions noted those increases are adding significantly to members' earnings.)
But the DGA did secure the WGA’s success bonus retroactively, announcing the addition to its members in January, months after it had concluded its initial talks with the studios. The streaming bonus was “never, in our view, a major economic item and it wasn't going to generate a lot of income, at least not now,” says the DGA representative. “But it is a nice bump for our members working on the small number of projects that qualify.”
A few talent reps who spoke to THR depict the bonuses so far as anticlimactic. “For an individual writer on a top show, it means a total of $9,000 or so in extra residuals,” said one top agent. “In total, for all writers, it’s meaningful money. For an individual, it is not paying for private school or for a mortgage. It is a small movement divided over a large pool of writers.”
The current streaming success bonuses might also change in the future — after all, the guilds will have another round of negotiations with the AMPTP in 2026. "I think we will revisit it as part of our preparation for the next round of bargaining," Crabtree-Ireland said.
The WGA's Stiehm sees the current streaming metric as a starting point. "I think this streaming provision was long overdue, and people are feeling good about it," she said. "We feel ambitious about improving it."
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