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EXCLUSIVE: Sunday will not be a day of rest for SAG-AFTRA leadership and studios this weekend.
Today’s virtual meeting between the AMPTP and Guild Leaders Fran Drescher, Duncan Crabtree-Ireland and the SAG-AFTRA Negotiating Committee has just concluded.
As the guild awaits a response from the studios on their latest proposal, it looks like the two sides will be working together tomorrow, October 29th. It doesn’t matter whether this is another meeting, either virtual or in person, or a review day. We hear that is still to be decided.
Saturday’s virtual session was described to Deadline as “a deep dive” into the heart of the matter.
The Gang of Four studio majors – Disney’s Bob Iger, Netflix’s Ted Sarandos, Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav and NBCUniversal’s Donna Langley – were not in attendance today.
Studios are eager to resume global television and feature film productions, which have been halted 107 days since the actors left on July 14. As with the WGA, the AMPTP is pushing for the guild to lift the injunction and ensure members get back to work even before a tentative deal is ratified. While the WGA agreed to a return to work during the contract ratification process with studios, there were fewer complications in enabling this 12,000-member union than the 160,000-strong actors’ guild, given its size.
Today’s meeting comes after a Zoom on Friday that many described as “disappointing” in terms of progress. However, the continued willingness of both sides to meet is a better sign than no talks at all.
After talks resumed on October 24, the studios proposed increasing minimum tariffs as well as higher bonuses based on the success of streaming shows and films. Studios offered a 7% increase in minimums, with SAG-AFTRA on Friday offering a self-described “comprehensive counter” that went from an 11% increase to 9%, sources on both sides told Deadline.
The studio’s proposal last week was in response to actors’ calls for an annual fee of 57 cents per subscriber for streamers. This request from SAG-AFTRA caused great ire among the studio brass. The studios “suspended” talks on October 11 for 12 days. Sarandos strongly referred to the actors’ proposal as “a levy on subscribers.” Crabtree-Ireland expressed his opinion on Sarandos’ words at NY Comic-Con, saying they were “absurd!”
“That’s like saying workers should be compensated for their work as a tax. That’s wrong. The reason the product exists is because of their work. “Fair compensation and fair wages for workers are not a tax, never have been, and never will be,” the SAG-AFTRA chief negotiator and national executive director told Deadline.
Some on the studio side criticized that a subscription fee for actors would backfire if an OTT service’s subscribers declined; The AMPTP parties believed that a performance-based measurement of revenue share would be better.
On Thursday evening, during a week of repeated conversations, an open letter to the SAG-AFTRA negotiating committee from Julia Louis Dreyfus, Jon Hamm, Sarah Paulson, Chelsea Handler, Christian Slater, Sandra Oh, Daveed Diggs, Pedro Pascal and others emphasized “We It’s better to stay on strike than make a bad deal.”
Drescher, Crabtree-Ireland and the Mission of the Negotiating Committee have expressed the Guild’s need to overhaul an outdated residual payment structure that does not take streaming into account. The days of guest stars, when syndication backlogs from long-running television series could cushion an actor’s year, are long gone. Short episodic streaming orders are the new norm.
The impact of the twin strikes has already cost the state of California $6.5 billion, with many below-the-line workers suffering from the halt in production and the loss of 45,000 industrial jobs. Already, the global box office is expected to lose $1.5 billion in 2024 due to the delay of Pixar’s “Mission: Impossible 8,” “Snow White” and “Elio” from its 2025 box office schedule. Even if an actors’ strike ends in the near future, the resumption of production and post-production of such films relies heavily on the actors.