A historic double strike that would effectively shut down the U.S. television and film industries could be less than 24 hours away as Hollywood studios and an enormous actors union race to settle wide-ranging disputes before their contract expires at 11:59 p.m. Wednesday.
The two sides – the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) – have even made a last-minute request to the federal government to mediate their dispute, which centers on fears that artificial-intelligence technology will be used to appropriate actors’ likenesses, as well as on demands for better pay and employment protections in the era of streaming.
SAG-AFTRA has threatened to put its 160,000 TV, film and radio actors on the picket lines as soon as Thursday if talks fail and to join an ongoing strike by Hollywood writers for the first time since 1960.
Here’s what you should know:
Will the federal government help SAG-AFTRA and AMPTP avert a strike?
Just a few weeks ago, it seemed that SAG-AFTRA was much closer to reaching a deal with Hollywood studios than the union’s counterpart, the Writers Guild of America, which has been on strike since the beginning of May.
“Our conversation is going to be very different, and I feel very hopeful that maybe we won’t get to this point,” SAG-AFTRA president Fran Drescher (“The Nanny”) said that month.
Even when members of the union – which includes nearly every TV, film and radio actor in the country – voted overwhelmingly June 5 to authorize a strike, SAG-AFTRA’s leaders portrayed the move as a negotiating tactic and downplayed the possibility that they actually would call a strike.
But the two sides have not been able to resolve their differences since then. When their three-year contract expired at the end of June with no deal, SAG-AFTRA and AMPTP extended it to midnight Wednesday.
“Members should be prepared for the very real possibility that the National Board will declare a strike ... as early as July 13,” a notice on SAG-AFTRA’s website warned.
With that deadline fast approaching, Variety reported Monday that union leaders held a call with top Hollywood publicists – “which one participant described as panicked” – preparing for the possibility that A-list actors will soon walk offset.
Then, on Tuesday, SAG-AFTRA confirmed reports that it had agreed to the studios’ “last-minute request for federal mediation” – although the union blasted the studios for “leak[ing]” the news to the press, and insisted its midnight deadline would not budge.
“The AMPTP has abused our trust and damaged the respect we have for them in this process,” the statement said. “We will not be manipulated by this cynical ploy to engineer an extension when the companies have had more than enough time to make a fair deal.”
The Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service did not immediately respond to a request for information on whether it will agree to join the negotiations before the midnight deadline.
Why might SAG go on strike?
Studios negotiate contracts with major Hollywood unions every few years, with the unions typically pushing for higher compensation and better working conditions and benefits.
That is true in this round of negotiations, but the rise of streaming TV and movies as well as the emergence of AI software have raised the stakes, causing some picketers to frame this round of negotiations as existential.
Many actors and writers say that the rise of streaming giants including Netflix and Disney+ have transformed the industry for the worse – with studios trying to turn writers into gig workers, cut workers out of profits yielded by streaming projects and slash productions costs.
“Shorter season orders and longer hiatuses between seasons makes it increasingly difficult for our members to achieve and maintain a middle class lifestyle working as a performer,” reads a statement on SAG-AFTRA’s website.
Writers are particularly worried about early experiments with AI and want guarantees that chatbots of the future won’t replace human jobs. Actors, in particular, want to regulate the technology so that studios can’t use it to mimic their likenesses without their permission or compensation.
SAG-AFTRA leaders also are asking for regulations on the rising trend of self-tapes: audition videos that actors are expected to record themselves.
The AMPTP generally has argued that such demands would prevent studios from innovating and hobble them at a time when streaming subscriptions have fallen and thousands of workers are being laid off in the entertainment industry.
How badly would a double strike disrupt Hollywood?
Strikes aren’t particularly uncommon in Hollywood, but they rarely approach the scale of the dual strike now being threatened.
The Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists – two separate unions before they merged into SAG-AFTRA in 2012 – have picketed several times since their formation in the 1930s. Their last action, a six-month joint strike in 2000 seeking residual payments for commercials, was one of the longest entertainment strikes in U.S. history.
On the writing side, the WGA’s three-month strike in 2007 is estimated to have cost the industry hundreds of millions of dollars and helped to fuel the rise of reality TV as studios were forced to work without scripts. The WGA’s current strike has disrupted dozens of major shows and movies – including Star Wars sequels and the final season of “Stranger Things,” although other projects have been able to keep shooting overseas or without new scripts.
If actors join writers Thursday in their walkout, the U.S. film industry is widely expected to grind to a halt entirely, with neither writers nor performers able to step on set. The only time that has happened before was in 1960, when Ronald Reagan led the Screen Actors Guild in a joint strike with the WGA. That dual strike led to the creation of a residual-payment system – a bit like royalties – that is now a staple of Hollywood.
A dual strike this week would be likely to put immense pressure on studios to accept the WGA and SAG-AFTRAs demands that the business of TV and filmmaking be transformed for the digital age.
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