Pricey cinema tickets and ￡2 more for Netflix: how viewers will pay for the actors’ strike
Hollywood, the world’s largest entertainment industry, effectively shut down in May and has remained closed for almost six months thanks to the combined industrial action of Tinseltown’s writers and actors. Films have been delayed, actors barred from promoting finished films and many people have left the industry. The effects have been global in scale and reach. This week, Warner Bros. Discovery announced it had lost half a billion dollars to the dispute, California lost some 45,000 jobs and the strikes knocked at least $6 billion off US GDP.
The money Los Angeles was expecting to pay for film and TV shows in 2023 was estimated at $240 billion (￡190 billion) – roughly the turnover of Google, almost twice the turnover of Ford, and four times the turnover of Boeing. With London the world’s third largest production hub, studios across the country, and film and TV crews usually rated the best in the world in industry surveys, a chunk of that was headed our way. In 2022, according to figures from the BFI, inward investment from Hollywood on films and high-end television was ￡5.37 billion. It’s not clear exactly how much of that we’ve lost this year, but it’s going to be billions.
The strikes were writers and actors reacting to the way Hollywood has and is changing – streamers had deals that paid talent less and offered less work, while the threat of AI in terms of writing scripts and creating synthetic actors threatened non-star talent’s increasingly precarious livelihoods. Now the strikes are over, champagne corks are popping all over the place... but is everything better now?
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Not quite. Matt Belloni, who writes for the respected industry newsletter Puck, welcomed the strike’s end with a bleak note: “What should be a time of relief and celebration in Hollywood is more akin to what soldiers experience in countless war movies – the horrors of battle give way to the equally grim reality of the new world for which they fought.” Hollywood is still undergoing financial and tech based upheaval, trust between staff and studios is at an all-time low, the crew members union’s contract is up next year leading to a fresh round of potentially studio shutting negotiations. So the aftershocks will be massive and long term. Hollywood will never be the same again – and it will affect you too. But how?
What did the actors actually get?
A lot. The full details will be released after the union’s National Board reviews the tentative agreement. and then it will have to be ratified by the rank and file, but in a memo to members the SAG-AFTRA negotiating committee valued the three year deal at over “one billion dollars” – a pittance compared to what’s been lost – including “above-pattern” pay increases and “unprecedented provisions for consent and compensation that will protect members from the threat of AI.”
In effect, it gives actors copyright over their bodies and voices. Studios can sample them, with permission and compensation, but only for use in projects the actors are already part of. Bad news for stunt stand-ins and extras playing stormtroopers, who will find they’re eminently replaceable or duplicatable. Good news for big name stars who, under the terms of the studios previous offers, had little control over their likeness being used in new movies long after their death (a la Peter Cushing in the Star Wars movie Rogue One).
There’s protection against the use of generative AI to create synthetic characters. Where there’s any use of actors by AI, the actor now has to grant consent and be paid. There’s also a “streaming participation bonus’, which will prove knotty. It means actors will get bonuses for appearing in hit shows but with streamers not releasing viewing data, who will measure a hit? The long-term beneficiaries of this will be the jobbing actors, not the superstars. “This strike was about people who are trying to make a middle class living,” SAG chief negotiator Duncan Crabtree-Ireland told Deadline.
Will we still get our summer blockbusters?
Possibly. There are no December blockbusters, Disney has evacuated Star Wars, Avengers and Avatar movies from 2024 and Mission: Impossible 8 and Dirty Dancing have moved to 2025 as a result of the strike. (Sequels to Twister, Pixar’s Inside Out and Alien are almost finished.) But if studios can move fast, they may be able to pull films forward again. Many have already been made and the delay was around the absence of actors at premieres so summer 2024 is moveable feast as studios race to rearrange their schedules over the next few weeks.
Can production just start up straight away?
Slowly. Right now every actor simultaneously wants a job, a meeting, a revised shooting schedule and publicity but it typically takes 4-6 weeks to ramp up production. In the UK, some productions have already begun this process – the industry was confident a deal would be reached this week, so prep work is already underway on a number of productions. Fully fledged filming will ramp up very slowly – LA traditionally shuts down for six weeks from Thanksgiving to the New Year.
This is partly because shutting down and starting up a movie is like shutting down and starting up a tanker; taking half a week off for Thanksgiving, shooting a bit more, then shutting down for two weeks for Christmas is expensive. Some filming is already restarting – including the two-part Wicked film adaptation, Minecraft, Deadpool 3 (now the only Marvel film being released in 2024), Gladiator 2 and Venom 3, but studios have warned that few new movies will start shooting before January. TV is easier. Yellowjackets, The White Lotus and Stranger Things are but all set to shoot again in the next few weeks.
How will it impact the UK?
The strike shut down a huge swathe of the UK production sector, and many British actors downed tools thanks to their SAG-AFTRA membership. Almost 75% of film and TV staff were out of work, with a third of them thinking of quitting. Skilled producers are working in supermarkets or as postmen. These people will at least arrive at Christmas knowing there’s work. “It cannot be overstated how much U.K. film and TV workers have suffered,” according to Philippa Childs, head of film and TV union BECTU.
The strike has exposed how dependent on the dollar the UK is. BECTU is calling on the government to help rebuild domestic film and TV sector so that we’re not as vulnerable should this happen again in three years’ time. In the UK, Andor, the Sandman and Heartstopper will restart but Amazon Studios’ series Blade Runner 2009 is not returning to Belfast.
Does this mean actors and their blatherings will be inescapable again? Is the red carpet back?
On Monday, David Tennant was hovering in a kind of Schrodinger’s Cat limbo. As a SAG member, Disney’s millions pumped into the new incarnation Doctor Who meant he couldn’t promote the show at the BBC’s screening of the 60thanniversary episode. But as the deal could have been reached over the weekend, he was on standby to grant interviews that evening. In one of the Tardis’s alternate universes, he presumably did. But from today, red carpets, movie mags and all the usual luvvie havens will be bursting at the seams with stars. PR’s have spent the last ten days lining up ‘possible interviews’ for late November “just in case the strike is called off”. Now we can all enjoy actors’ views on the Israel/Palestine question at our leisure.
What about streaming?
Prices are already going up, streamers are already slashing spending and shows, companies are already trading series between each other for a little extra cash, and the big show runner deals are no longer safe. The golden age of streaming is over. Netflix, Apple TV+, Disney +, Prime Video, Paramount + and YouTube have all upped subscriptions recently – meaning that, on average, the top tier subscription fee is now around ￡10. Netflix alone raised prices by ￡2 a month, and more price rises aren’t out of the question.
This week, Disney announced it was spending $2 billion less on content in 2024. Ampere Analysis estimates the major global streaming platforms Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV+, Paramount+ and Max/HBO Max will raise their programming budgets by an overall 7 per cent in 2024, compared to 24 per cent growth last year.
Scripted drama spend will fall by 30 per cent and budgets for cheaper unscripted game shows and reality TV will be up by 22 per cent. Hollywood’s TV output peaked last year at a record 599 new shows, according to FX Networks’ annual analysis. Reports from trade press and industry suggest this will fall by some 20 per cent next year to about 480. That’s still too many to watch in a single year, of course.
Will cinema prices go up, and can the chains survive?
The strike coming so soon after Covid is not going to be easy on cinemas. With Cineworld and Empire both through administration earlier this year, Odeon shuttering screens over the summer and US chain AMC only surviving thanks to raising $325 million in September by issuing 40 million shares, the industry needs customers. Cost of living pressures have hit prices at independent cinemas, and the chains may have to follow suit.
A parade of big hits would help ease those pressures and 2024 still has some big movies – Inside Out 2 and Joker 2, to name but two. But, thanks to the success of Taylor Swift’s Eras tour movie – which was sold directly to cinemas with no studio middlemen and has banked $231 million to date, and the forthcoming Beyonce Renaissance tour movie, again released directly to cinemas in December, there’s a new revenue stream that can bypass Hollywood completely. No actors, no distributors, just huge audiences. Olivia Rodrigo and Harry Styles are rumoured to be planning theirs and of course the comedian Kevin Bridges is releasing a stand up special on November 17. This may bank less than Tay-Tay.
Are the Oscars still happening, and will anything be different?
Entries for the 2024 Oscars are underway and the awards are March 10. With Oscar campaigning usually involving the full cast glad handing at special screenings for Academy members from October through the December shortlist vote to the nominees announcement at the end of January, an awful lot of work is going to be crammed into the next month or so.
Bradley Cooper’s Maestro, in which he both directs and stars as Leonard Bernstein, as well as the cast of Oppenheimer and Barbie, the summer blockbusters seeking awards clout, have a head of steam – they’re known and barely need to campaign. It’s the smart indie films such as the publishing satire American Fiction, Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers, or A24’s critically acclaimed Past Lives that might have easily ridden a wave of strategic screenings into glory in a normal year – the same studio took Everything Everywhere All at Once to the top in 2023 – that have their work cut out;
Having said that, it’s possible we’ll see some strike votes from the WGA and SAG academy members – best actor might include the best donuts on the picket line – so surprising winners may emerge.
