MOVIE NEWS – Further talks could occur after several studios’ CEOs met in person with the Writers Guild of America (WGA).

It’s been a week since the Writers Guild of America (WGA) sent a memo to its members. In it, they reported on a tense meeting with the CEOs of several leading studios on their negotiating committee. According to insiders, some of these CEOs and other studio executives are meeting to discuss next steps as progress on the agreement has stalled.

According to studio insiders, Hollywood executives have spent the past week unsure of where to go from here and say they are unwilling to “negotiate against themselves” in further talks.

The two sides remain significantly distanced. Even though the latest AMPTP proposal, offered on 11 August and unveiled in a move opposed by WGA members last Tuesday, showed some movement on critical fronts.

In a memo to members, the WGA wrote that the latest counter-proposal “means nothing and is not nearly enough.” It also said it would continue to fight tenaciously for an agreement that ensures all its key concerns – from protecting artificial intelligence to securing the future of the writers’ room – are addressed.

“Our demands come directly from the membership itself. They address the existential threats to the writing profession and our individual careers, all caused by changes in the business model that companies have adopted over the last seven to ten years,” the guild wrote.

The WGA also said in a note that it was awaiting a response to AMPTP’s counter-offer to its 11 August bid. Which it said was further discussed during the negotiations on 16 and 17 August. An insider with knowledge of the negotiations said that much of the discussion on those days was around the regulation of artificial intelligence.

However, on other fronts, such as the writers’ room and transparency of streaming data, talks remained slow. This led to the meeting on 22 August, where several CEOs, including Bob Iger of Disney and David Zaslav of Warner Bros. Discovery, urged the writers to accept AMPTP’s offer of 11 August. When the WGA persisted, they informed the guild that they would make their offer public so that it could be presented directly to guild members.

However, this attempt to influence the WGA’s ranking backfired. The members considered the public disclosure of their AMPTP bid to be a breach of good faith towards the WGA negotiators.

Of the various points raised by the guild in their notes, the writers pointed most to the AMPTP offer. It says that it will report on streaming viewership data on a quarterly basis so that, as the studios said last week, this data “will allow the WGA to develop proposals for future changes to the current SVOD residuals system”. However, this data will not be made public to WGA members who work on streaming shows and films.

“One of the reasons for this strike is that streaming wages have been too low for so long, and now they are offering us something for future contract negotiations?” said a retired writer who requested anonymity. “This is just a stall. I don’t know why they thought writers would find this satisfactory”.

Meanwhile, anxiety is mounting among studios about the damage the strike could do to the entertainment industry. Especially if writers and actors remain on the picket line well into the fall. Films such as Sony’s Kraven the Hunter and Warner Bros’ Dune: Part Two have been dropped from the fall 2023 release schedule in the hope that the SAG-AFTRA strike will be resolved in 2024, allowing the film actors to do promotional work.

Source: Deadline