THB #367: Strike(s) Update, Day 86

I haven’t written about the WGA and SAG/Aftra strike(s) in 10 days. And you know what has happened in those 10 days?

Nothing.

Actually, “nothing” is too generous a measurement. Things are worse for the strikers. Every day not working is money out of their pockets. Plus, the media focus has completely been swamped by Barbie and Oppenheimer. (I’m starting a new movement to seperate the names… edgy, eh?)

We have been through a cycle of The Men Who Want To Claim To Run The Industry, as every Ted, Ari, and Donna has been floated as “the hero who can mend the rift.” Today, the usually brilliant Joe Adalian is floating the idea that a heroic effort could be made by a Business Affairs person. Yes, we have gotten this desperate.

We have travelled through the notion that Netflix will float easily above the fray because of international production to the realization that Netflix’s profits travel mostly through America to the harsher truth that Netflix’s ad program has not been quite as successful as advertised and they are already cutting ad pricing, even though we are still in the early days of their ad offerings. But not before the leading Streamer threw $10/mo ad-free subs to the dogs, either forcing loyal members to either accept the ad-based experience or to add 50% a month to their Netflix spending, aka Sarandos’ Choice.

The nasty realization that content companies, already in the midst of severe budget cutbacks, are being financially aided in the short-term by the strikes has been discussed in many quarters… but probably not enough. The mystery question, which may be the actual key to the endgame of the strike for the AMPTP side, is how long that short-term benefit is… 3 months (which would be August 2) or 6 months (November 2) or longer or somewhere in the middle?

I continue to be very sure that those numbers have been run within each studio and to some degree shared amongst the AMPTP companies. I don’t know if an end date is set or if there is still tension between, say, a company that wants to settle in August and others that want to wait until October to even consider settling. But I am 100% sure these decisions are not being made on that side primarily by emotion.

The deep well of rage and passion on the side of WGA and SAG/Aftra is not wrong. It is not silly. It is not frivilous.

But it is very complicated. Because whenever this end, the work is going to begin again. And fortunes will be made by a very select number of actors and writers. More so, the people who are fighting to keep their family’s health insurance and pension funding, not to mention rent and food on the table, will be working with those actors and writers on the top of the food chain and, through agents, The Money, with whom they are so very & righteously angry at this very (hot) day.

Fortune smiled on Barbie this last week and everyone involved. But this too is complicted.