One year ago, Hollywood greeted Labor Day with the guilds representing actors and writers on strike, as studios juggled movie release schedules and cobbled together prime-time lineups largely devoid of original domestically produced scripted series. Even the Emmy Awards, the traditional kickoff to the new TV season, were postponed until January.
That labor strife was subsequently settled, as both guilds came to terms before Thanksgiving. Yet the entertainment industry enters what can only be seen as another fall filled with discontent, with talent and crews griping about fewer opportunities all around. For their part, the studios have implemented layoffs amid shrinking stock prices, tumbling valuations of their TV networks and unsettling mergers creating a sense that whatever the outcome of last year’s standoff, everyone, with the benefit of hindsight, might have lost.
Despite the pain associated with their extended work stoppages, writers and actors felt that they had to take a tough, principled stand against studios and streaming services, addressing a shifting business model that was depriving them of fair compensation for their work.
Although the studios insisted they were struggling themselves as their business evolves, the guilds won the public relations war — portraying the wealthy CEOs bargaining opposite them as the bad guys — and ultimately, the companies largely bowed to the writers’ and actors’ demands on key issues. Concessions included pay increases, better health and pension contributions, viewership-based bonuses tied to streaming (where hard data had remained elusive), and protections regarding the use of AI, or artificial intelligence, to supplant flesh-and-blood writers and actors.
“When you take a look at this contract, in overall terms, it’s really extraordinary,” SAG-AFTRA executive director Duncan Crabtree-Ireland told the website Deadline in December after his membership ratified the agreement, estimating more than $1 billion in contract gains.
The story since then, however, has mostly been as bleak as an Ingmar Bergman film. Actors, writers and crew members have been forced to pursue side gigs to scrape by, and a stream of worried first-person accounts from Hollywood’s front lines prompted a series from trade site the Wrap titled “Holding On in Hollywood.”
“It was hard before the strike. It’s even harder now,” writer Corey Grant told NPR in June, characterizing the decline in jobs as a potentially punitive step by studios and “a backlash because of the strike.”
That’s certainly possible, although perusing recent headlines about studios and streaming services does suggest a bottom-line rationale for the cutbacks as well. Those companies have spent heavily trying to amass more streaming subscriptions, without offsetting the financial trade-offs related to their slumping real-time, or linear, networks and theatrical releases.
Warner Bros. Discovery has laid off more than 1,000 employees (disclosure: As an alumnus of CNN, I was one of them), and recently told investors the company’s networks, including TNT, CNN and Discovery Channel, are worth $9 billion less than a few years ago.
The Times described that decline as part of “an industrywide reckoning,” with Paramount also reducing the value of its networks by billions and laying off nearly 1 in 6 employees, while negotiating to sell what’s left of the company.
Even streaming services, including Netflix and Amazon’s Prime Video, have become more selective about ordering programming — in part to reduce costs and in part because they have enjoyed success with series less expensively acquired from overseas, such as the South Korean drama “Squid Game” or the British black comedy “Baby Reindeer.”
There have been a few welcome rays of sunlight this summer: Disney’s box-office bounty from the sequels “Deadpool & Wolverine” and “Inside Out 2,” which have grossed nearly $3 billion worldwide combined.
The grim reality, though, points to an industry in a painful state of flux, mirroring the digital transition that overwhelmed the newspaper industry.
What seems clear is that while the fall is traditionally a season of hope and optimism, with new TV shows about to debut and the pivot from summer movies toward prestige releases vying for top awards, the prevailing mood in Hollywood exhibits little of either. And while actors and writers rightfully celebrated last year’s hard-won contractual victories, the sad plot twist of 2024 is that higher wages and improved residuals don’t mean much without access to jobs that will yield those short- and longer-term dividends.
Brian Lowry is a former media critic for CNN and Variety, and a former reporter and columnist at the Los Angeles Times.