The dispute that could paralyze Hollywood and the platforms that distribute films and series around the world is coming to a head. This week the 11,000 writers represented by the Writers Guild of America (WGA) will decide whether to authorize the union to call a strike if an agreement on the renewal of the contract with studios and streamers has not been found. Screenwriters could cross their pens from May 1st.
IF SO (and there is pessimism in the city about an agreement), it would be the first strike in the category since 2008, when the paralysis lasted 100 days. Writers, as essential as they are marginalized and underpaid in the entertainment machine (as well as historically militant), were also at the center of contentious disputes in 1998 and 2001. In any case, the bone of contention was the salary linked to new technologies, and this time it was not it’s an exception, with writers claiming a contract that takes into consideration streaming innovations that, in the post-pandemic world, have revolutionized the same industrial model.
From 2019 to today alone, the productive investment of the studios has quadrupled (from 5 to 19 billion dollars a year) due to the competition for subscribers and the adoption of the Netflix model by the major, forced, by the closure of the theaters, to equip themselves with their own platforms. The explosion in the number of series produced (600 were released last year alone) has in theory produced a commensurate volume of work for workers and creatives, but the WGA note that the fees have not kept up. According to union data, the average salary of screenwriters has decreased by 4% over the last decade. Half of the authors receive the minimum wage today compared to only 33% who took the minimum in 2013, and the compensation has been on a steady decline since 2019.
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Work on the set in the time of Covid, challenges and solutions in the USA and UKA thorny issue, as usual, concerns the royalties that authors can sustain in the periods between active productions. Those linked to streaming are lower than for films distributed in theaters or programs broadcast on TV or pay per view. Successful programs in particular, at the time of the ether, were retransmitted, contributing to an increase in “residuals” while streaming contents only pay off as long as they remain “on the menu” and, going beyond previous contracts, are calculated in a more opaque way. Furthermore, streaming series are sometimes made up of only 8-10 episodes per season, instead of the canonical 22 of traditional television, with an obvious impact on the writers’ fees, normally paid per episode. Furthermore, production times are often much longer, also lengthening the pause between writing moments. Overall, according to the WGA, the advent of the digital age in Hollywood has contributed to conditions of “creative precariousness” more akin to the gig economy, which make it difficult to make ends meet in cities like Los Angeles and New York.
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A bit of unionFor their part, the production companies complain of a situation of general economic uncertainty aggravated by the one deriving from the sudden change in the distribution model made necessary by force majeure. After years of vertical growth, the sector is in the midst of a structural consolidation that has seen the emergence of conglomerates such as Warner-Discovery and others resulting from large mergers, such as Disney’s purchase of Fox. Hardly anyone thinks that the resulting explosion of platforms is sustainable in the long term and many predict a slowdown in the so-called “peak TV” that fueled the boom in series. After the cold shower of Netflix’s decline in subscribers last year, the era of blank checks and mega-budgets also seems to be fading. In the city, for example, Netflix’s recent turnaround on Paris Paramount, the «rom com» signed by Nancy Meyers with Scarlett Johansson, Owen Wilson, Penelope Cruz and Michael Fassbender, whose budget had levitated to 150 million dollars, caused quite a stir . In short, even «Big N» has been replaced by a more moderate regime and the administration pays more attention to the actual number of viewings and subscribers.
IT IS TRUE that the new protagonists in Hollywood are giants with roots in Silicon Valley and vast reserves of cash, such as Netflix, Amazon and Apple, but it is also true that the tech giants themselves are undergoing a general downsizing of their workforce (those fired from big tech last year there were more than 200,000). In short, for the screenwriters it could be a less than ideal time to win the dispute.
Streamers today are more multinational conglomerates than studios even in terms of production spread across many territories – The Hollywood dispute could lead them to transfer a greater number of productions to other countries. The dispute promises to be a test of how much the transnational model has weakened the “native” creative workforce. There’s a lot at stake, you know, in Hollywood over the next couple of weeks. Especially since the DGA contract – that of the directors – expires at the end of June.