The show must go on, but then again it might not: Hollywood still facing strikes

After what was breathily described as an intense weekend of negotiations, the Writers Guild of America (WGA) announced on Monday that it has accepted the terms of a deal to end its 146-day strike. The WGA may not have broken the previous strike record of 155 days, set in 1988, but it seems to have got the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) to accede to most of its demands.

These include protection for writers against the looming and increasingly speedy ascent and threats of artificial intelligence; better residual payments for shows screened on streaming platforms; and regulations that will govern the minimum number of writers that studios must hire for the writing rooms of TV shows.

This is all good news for the more than 11,000 writers represented by the WGA and it should mean that scripted weekly shows such as The Tonight Show, Real Time with Bill Maher, Last Week Tonight with John Oliver and other talk show staples of the American TV world can resume work. They may begin airing as soon as next week and shows and films waiting for the completion of their scripts can get rolling again — but it won’t necessarily spell the end of the large headache plaguing studios and streaming service owners.

That’s because there are still 16,000 Screen Actors Guild (SAG) members on the picket lines and rumours are that their strike won’t end before the middle of November. It’s all very well to have scripts ready but it’s going to make very little difference to anything if there is nobody to speak the words on camera.

Once the SAG strike is resolved a scheduling crisis straight out of a Kafka novel awaits Hollywood as a number of major productions all looking for the star power of a small pool of big names will have to fight it out to decide who goes first.

Finally, and perhaps most troublingly for everyone, is an underreported but hard-to-ignore fact: the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE), which represents the more than 168,000 crew and technical workers who are the backbone of the Hollywood machine, has its contract coming up for renegotiation in 2024.

After what’s happened with writers and actors in 2023, it is likely that the IATSE will go to the picket lines if its demands are not met, completely shutting down everything for yet another undetermined period and sending the whole process of film production back to square one.

There is also the sticky question of what studio reaction to the strike has done to the film and television industry and how much work there will be for those looking to get back to it. Many studios decided not to wait for a strike result to cancel shows that were scheduled to resume production, leaving the writers on those shows with nowhere to go now that their strike is over.

Though the AMPTP suffered some serious public relations (PR) damage for its attitude to the strikers and their demands, overall most of the organisation’s members managed to save significant costs on production in the short term. To maintain their profits they could just continue to cut down on the number of shows and films they make, leading to huge job losses for writers in the long run.

While writers and actors were on the streets coming up with witty “damn the man” quips to scrawl on their placards, the streamers rallied together to form a new organisation called the Streaming Innovation Alliance (SIA).

The SIA does not enjoy the membership of Amazon or Apple TV, but it includes most of the rest of the major players in the streaming business. It intends to protect members from “regulatory interference” from US legislators and to “tell positive stories about streaming companies” to try to avoid the same kind of negative PR as the film studios during the strikes and to offer protection from future ones.

Last and most important is the question of what happens to consumers and audiences once all the current labour disputes have been resolved. Though the promised dearth of choices due to the strike action did not really come to pass, the upcoming scheduling nightmares will probably see longer waiting times between film and TV releases while the backlog is cleared.

Films such as Dune Part Two, which was supposed to be released in 2023 and has been rescheduled for 2024, will knock off other films slated for release next year. Some series the preproduction schedules of which were derailed by strike action and can now resume, will still have to wait for the outcome of the SAG strike before they can start shooting and an IATSE strike next year will be force them back into limbo.

Most significantly for audiences: where will the money come for the increased residual payments to WGA members and, in all likelihood SAG members as well.

It’s certainly not coming out of the pockets of media conglomerate and studio CEOs or board members, so it will be left to consumers to pick up the tab. If the other current dispute with actors is not resolved soon and another dispute with crews is on the horizon, the big question will be not why we’re paying more for streaming and movie tickets, but rather what exactly we’re paying for.