In Hollywood, imminent end of the screenwriters' strike

After 146 days of strike, the single union of film and series screenwriters has reached an agreement with American film and television studios. Terms of the agreement have not yet been released, but details are expected to emerge soon, as the document signed by the Writers Guild of America (WGA) must now be adopted by a vote of the organization's 11,500 members.

While the studios are weakened by the fall in television audiences and the saturation of the video-on-demand market, the screenwriters' guild demanded better working conditions in three areas: profit-sharing in the success of films and series, the guarantee of hiring a minimum number of screenwriters for the total duration of productions and guarantees that the growing use of artificial intelligence does not replace their functions. The WGA claims to have obtained an “exceptional” contract with “real advances and protections”.

The work of the screenwriters will only resume after the ratification of the three-year contract. The hope of producers is that the imminent end of the long strike will accelerate the negotiations which will put an end to the other strike which paralyzes Hollywood: that of the union of 150,000 actors which began on July 14.

Five consecutive days of haggling directly involving the most powerful bosses in Hollywood have made it possible to break the impasse which has suspended the production of American films and serials since the beginning of May. David Zaslav, boss of Warner Bros. Discovery, Bob Iger, his counterpart at Disney, Ted Sarandos of Netflix and Donna Langley who runs NBCUniversal, criticized by the WGA for their remuneration considered astronomical, while the majority of screenwriters enjoy a modest standard of living, had set themselves the date of Sunday, before the Yom Kippur holiday, to reach an agreement.

It is estimated that it will take two months, from the ratification of the contract, for production to resume normally. Thousands of people, non-strikers, affected by the strike are particularly impatient. These include the operators, costume designers, caterers, lighting designers who populate the Hollywood industry. The collateral losses caused by this social conflict in California, but also in other states essential to filming such as New Mexico, Georgia and New York City, are estimated at at least $5 billion.

The new issue of the emergence of artificial intelligence complicated the negotiation. Screenwriters fear that studios will present them with scripts already written by sophisticated computer programs. Their role would only be to revise these documents and improve them. They also demanded that their work already completed could not be used to program computers (machine learning) to reproduce series and films.

Furthermore, one of the stumbling blocks in the negotiation was the way in which the studios and their streaming platforms would share their measurements of the popularity of the series. Without clear standards on this issue, calculating profits generated by the production, distribution and syndication of content becomes impossible. For their part, the studios argued that the economic risk of financing a film or series is enormous. The frequent failure of productions to excite the public results in heavy losses for the studios, while the screenwriters do not suffer the direct consequences.