Happy 100! SAG-AFTRA And Studios To Return To Talks On Tuesday

(Updated with SAG-AFTRA tweet) After over a week of silence, the actors union and the AMPTP are now set to return to negotiations on Tuesday, October 24.

“SAG-AFTRA and the AMPTP will meet for bargaining on Tuesday, October 24 at SAG-AFTRA Plaza. Several executives from AMPTP member companies will be in attendance,” read a statement today from SAG-AFTRA and the AMPTP.

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That means, similar to the final days of the WGA talks and this previous round of SAG-AFTRA talks, that the CEO gang of four will be in the room next week. Disney’s Bob Iger, Warner Bros Discovery’s David Zaslav, Netflix’s Ted Sarandos and NBCUniversal’s Donna Langley, have been participating in efforts to close an agreement with the actors union for the past several weeks.

In fact, it was the studio bosses who asked the Guild for the talks to restart, we hear — an offer that was accepted in short order. That intel was confirmed in a post the Guild put up on social media not long after the second round new talks were announced.

As they had with the WGA in August, the studios left the SAG-AFTRA talks and announced them “suspended” on October 11. SAG-AFTRA Chief Negotiator and National Executive Director Duncan Crabtree-Ireland told Deadline Thursday that he remained “optimistic” that both sides would sit across the table soon.

Said Crabtree-Ireland, “I did not expect [negotiations] would have to go so long…The amount of time spent without negotiating has been completely unconscionable. The studios and streamers ought to be back at the table with us now. They should have been there the first 80 days but they weren’t. I am very eager to see that happen and I believe it will happen soon. I think there’s a lot of pressure happening outside of formal channels to get people back to the table, so I’m optimistic that that will happen sometime soon. But I know that we’re just going to stand strong and get a fair deal.”

While not unusual for labor talks to start and stall and start again, as we saw with the WGA and the studios recently, it seems that this specific resumption of deliberations is in no small part due to a PR campaign of shame against the studios by SAG-AFTRA, sources on both sides tell us.

Talks broke apart on Oct. 11 with SAG-AFTRA proposing a 75 cents per subscriber annual charge in a revenue share plan with the studios. The next day at a Bloomberg conference, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos called such a charge a “levy on subscribers on top of [other] areas” as well as a “bridge too far”. Crabtree-Ireland slammed Sarandos’ statement as “preposterous” in an interview with Deadline last Saturday. The studios balked at the guild’s ask saying in a public statement that it was an “untenable economic burden” which would cost them more than $2.4 billion over the course of a new three-year contract or more than $800 million per year. SAG-AFTRA responded by saying that the studios “intentionally misrepresented to the press the cost of the above proposal – overstating it by 60%.”

On Tuesday, Hollywood’s biggest stars gathered on a Zoom call with SAG-AFTRA leaders, pledging to commit $150 million over three years to remove a cap on union dues to bring more coin to guild coffers, and suggesting a streamer residual structure that would put actors on the bottom of the call sheet before them. The hope was that getting money faster would help more struggling actors qualify for benefits.

Deadline told you first that the roster of thespians included George Clooney, Scarlett Johansson, Kerry Washington, Tyler Perry, Bradley Cooper, Meryl Streep, Jennifer Aniston, Robert De Niro, Ben Affleck, Laura Dern, Emma Stone, Reese Witherspoon, Ryan Reynolds, and Ariana DeBose.

However, union leader Fran Drescher later said that such a move would be incompatible with the contract that SAG-AFTRA was attempting to negotiate. The Clooney offer “does not impact the contract that we’re striking over whatsoever,” said Drescher on Instagram Thursday night on why the offer couldn’t work.

“I also want to thank George Clooney for organizing the suggestion that… take the caps off of the dues so that the highest paid members can contribute more…We are a federally regulated labor union and the only contributions that can go into our pension and health funds must be from the employer. So what we are fighting for in terms of benefits has to remain in this contract.”

The SAG-AFTRA President in an exclusive column with Deadline on the 100th day of the strike wrote, “SAG-AFTRA members have been systematically squeezed out of their ability to make a living due to a streaming model that reduces the number of episodes in a season by two-thirds and the number of seasons by two-thirds, while completely cutting off the syndication tail.”

She added, “This dramatic compression of work opportunities coupled with inadequate compensation has had a devastating effect on the working actors and journeyman actors who bring movies and television shows to life. It has compromised their ability to pay their rent, put food on the table and clothes on their children’s backs.”

“Over the past decade, streaming has cannibalized much of the entertainment industry’s more traditional forms of exhibition and it is clearly here to stay. It’s a fact: streaming is generating tens of billions of dollars in revenue for these companies, but that economic success is not trickling down to actors,” she expounded.

Together with the WGA strike, which ended on Sept. 27, the ongoing SAG-AFTRA strike has cost the California economy $5 billion. Additionally, per Labor statistics, 45K jobs have been lost in the entertainment industry with the fall box office off near $400M from the pre-pandemic 2019 frame (the post Labor Day through mid October).

While writers rooms have returned, the start of the new TV season hangs in limbo. A January 2024 telecast was hoped for by studios as they reached a deal with scribes, pinning their hopes that the actors would immediately find their way to a contract as well. That has not happened as SAG-AFTRA has held firm to getting better terms on streaming residuals/revenue share, in addition to better rights for actors in regards to their use by AI.

Also bound to be collateral damage as part of the strike is the 2024 theatrical release calendar and potentially exhibition itself as more big movies will either move off the schedule or become delayed. Cinemas, with the help of the U.S. government, were able to scrape by after being shuttered for close to a year due to Covid. The box office boomed back, but not to pre-pandemic $11 billion domestic levels. With big studio Hollywood films shut down worldwide, that will indeed force the majors to delay movies, leaving gaps on the release calendar, and putting the debt-laden exhibition pipeline in dire straits. Deadline told you first that Marvel Studios’ Deadpool 3, which is only half completed, won’t meet its May 3 start-of-summer release date even if the strike wraps in the near future.

Deadline’s Rosy Cordero contributed to this article.

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