Why the Hollywood Writers’ strike matters: the Writers Guild of America has stated that while series budget has increased, writers’ share of pay has shrunk
Los Angeles: Hollywood Union writers from the Writers Guild of America go on strike for higher pay
The Writers Guild of America (WGA) representing 11,500 writers of film, television and other entertainment forms are on strike since May 2nd 2023. The writers decided to go on strike since they didn’t reach a satisfactory agreement after the dispute with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), which represents the major film and television studios in Hollywood.
It’s the first Hollywood strike in 15 years. The centre of the dispute is mainly money. The guild says that even as series budgets have increased, writers’ share of pay has increasingly shrunk. Work stoppage is supposed to last 100 days and will probably disrupt production on several series and films.
Stranger Things, Yellowjackets, Severance and more. The show affected by the Hollywood writers’ strike
The strike has now entered its second month. The shows went off air as soon as the strike started are late-night talk shows, precisely: The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, Late Night With Seth Meyers, The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Last Week Tonight With John Oliver and Real Time With Bill Maher all went off air as soon as the strike started.
Even if the strike was prolonged, theatrical releases likely won’t be affected until the last quarter of 2023 or early 2024.Regarding streaming platform favourites, The Duffer Brothers, Directors and showrunners for Netflix’s hit show Stranger Things, have announced on Twitter that season 5 production has stopped.
Jen Statky, creator of HBO’s Hacks said there was ‘no other way’ but to halt production, as well as Yellowjackets co-creator Ashley Lyle, who adhered to the strike saying they will resume their work when WGA will get a ‘fair deal’. Apple’s Severance has shut down production in New York the second week of the writers’ strike as a result of picketing.
The streaming services take-over. What consequences for the future of the film industry?
In the past 10 years, there has been a massive structural change in the way Hollywood has managed movies and television production with lots of revenues in the system and not a lot of profit. Studios have been investing in the building environment of the streaming platforms and a big group of writers have been squeezed without seeing requisite benefits, as claimed by the WGA.
Other than that, the streaming service is not providing a consistent and sustained calendar of income, causing the number of writers working at guild minimums to go from about a third to about half in the past decade. According to WGA statistics, median writer-producer pay has declined 23%, while streaming platforms have become increasingly popular.
Netflix, Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, HBO. What the studios are offering
Many studios and companies have cut spending on content as they try to turn a profit. Streaming’s popularity has also led to declining television ad revenue for traditional networks.
Producers have argued that the streaming business is new and studios and networks still don’t know what profit margins will look like in the future. One of the primary sticking points in the negotiations for the writers’ strike have concerned union proposals that would require companies to staff shows with an assigned number of writers for certain periods of time.
In the meantime, the studios have been sending out letters to showrunners asking them to continue working on their respective projects – going against their right to strike – trying to warn them that since the production has been interrupted, then writers won’t get paid.
Hollywood might be pondering to let AI like Chat GPT in the writing room
The fear among writers is that studio executives could eventually replace them with AI. In the negotiations the proposals included one that material produced through artificial intelligence be more carefully regulated so that studios cannot use AI to undermine writers or worse eliminate them.
Lines protesting outside the studios had the writers stand up for their rights trying to make the point that they’re not against the use of artificial intelligence unless they are the genesis of any creation.
Script was written by Chat GPT and adapted for television, but according to actual writers, they were severely flawed. AI understands the structure of what to do, but they are unable to infuse any spirit or depth.
The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, say that the use of AI raises ‘hard, creative and legal questions for everyone’ and that it requires more discussion. They also point out that the current agreement already defines writers as people, so AI-generated material wouldn’t be eligible for writing credits.
Disney already using AI for screenwriting, defining them as ‘better serving’ for the consumers
Disney’s CEO Bob Iger is already discussing the possibility to let AI make part of the creative job as it is expected to ‘create efficiencies and ways for us to basically provide better services to customers’. Investments on Disney’s side suggest that the company has been betting on AI to improve their storytelling.
The platform Deep Story AI is making its way in the future of Disney, and it could be working to track eye movements, facial expressions and social interaction on web pages and choose the best liked stories at incredibly fast pace, fuelling non-stop production. After all, Disney is a company already proven to be using AI to track down consumers behaviour, using the data from the theme parks visit to optimise their services and enrich the company’s algorithms.
As far as we are concerned, Deep Story AI is still hypothetical, but it wouldn’t be surprising if the studio decided to make space for it. Advantages aside, Iger went on explaining that AI could be highly disruptive and extremely difficult to manage, particularly from an IP management perspective.
Writers Guild of America (WGA)
The Writers Guild of America is the joint efforts of two different American labour unions representing writers in film, television, radio, and online media: The Writers Guild of America, East, headquartered in New York City and affiliated with the AFL–CIO The Writers Guild of America West, headquartered in Los Angeles.
