Sao Paulo
The Hollywood actors union SAGAFTRA announced this Wednesday the 8th that it has reached an agreement with the producers’ alliance AMPTP. In doing so, the group confirmed the end of the 118day strike in the category.
The union committee unanimously approved AMPTP’s offer. The strike will end between Wednesday and Thursday, November 9, at 12:01 a.m. Los Angeles time or 5:01 a.m. Brasília time. The artists have been on strike since July 13th.
No details of the agreement signed between the two groups have been disclosed so far. The document is expected to be published next Friday, November 10, after it has been approved by all union members.
According to Variety magazine, the agreement provides for a 7% increase in actors’ salaries, two percentage points higher than what was predicted in negotiations between AMPTP and the directors’ and screenwriters’ unions. The document also offers artists legal protection against the use of their images by artificial intelligence.
The agreement was signed after negotiations between SAG and AMPTP resumed early last month. The discussions included some of the industry’s top executives, including Disney CEO Bob Iger and Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav and Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos.
Hollywood studios made what was considered a final offer earlier this week, but the union rejected it because it disagreed with the terms of the artificial intelligence issue.
The issue, one of the most sensitive for the strikers, concerned the use of scanned images of the actors for later use in the productions in which they were involved, without the companies needing permission from the artists for reuse.
With the rejection, the studios agreed to reword the section on the topic and sent back the revised offer this Tuesday, November 7th.
The actors’ strike, along with the screenwriters’ strike, caused severe financial damage to the industry. According to the Milken Institute, the economy of the state of California suffered a hit of $6 billion equivalent to R$29 billion. Audiovisual production in the region also fell by 41% in the last quarter as a large part of film and series production had to be frozen.