We're now roughly a year out from the start of 2023's SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes, when (you may recall) the Hollywood studios decided it was worth shutting down their entire industry for months in order to avoid paying writers and actors a portion of streaming profits, or making a promise not to digitally scan every extra to ever work on a studio project and store them in a sort of perpetual digital hell, to be deployed any time they needed a little extra crowd cover in the background of a CGI superhero fight. A year on, then, how have the actual wins from the new contracts worked out for the creators of Hollywood? THR did a bit of asking around this week on the topic, and while you have to squint in a few cases—including at the fact that everyone happy about the contracts is very willing to go on the record with their name, while anyone with complaints stays decidedly anonymous—the results still feel like a bit of a mixed bag.Notably, the big compromise position that the studios ended up landing on for compensating actors for the success of streaming shows—where every show that generated a certain threshold of views would lead the studio to put money in a pool, to be divided 75-25 between performs on those shows or movies, and a larger, still-undefined pool of performers—has yet to get off the ground at all. (Negotiators are still waiting on streaming data; meanwhile, the THR piece quotes at least one union board member who expresses unhappiness that the union got talked down from straight revenue-sharing for streaming productions to this more complicated and ambiguous format. Going for that probably would have blown up negotiations entirely, from reports at the time, but it also means the studios haven't yet had to shell out any of that all-important streaming revenue to anybody)In other practicalities, the new contracts have basically ended the practice of writing "mini-rooms," which had come into vogue in the years leading up to the strikes. Basically, studios would hire a crew of people to write pre-production material for a show, but without a promise of actually being hired on for the show in question. The contracts instituted a minimum number of staffers for these rooms, as well as requirements to be hired to staff, which—stop us if you've heard this one—the studios agreed to, and then just stopped doing mini-rooms, period. That means an overall drop in the number of writing jobs—something that's come under heavy critique—but, as noted by Legends Of Tomorrow's Marc Guggenheim, "I would argue that mini rooms were very good for quantity of jobs, but lousy for quality of jobs.” Also, in practicalities: Daily minimums for background actors are up, and that one, at least feels like a pretty unambiguous win.The final question, of course, is whether any of the very bloody fights over the use of artificial intelligence in the summer of 2023 have produced anything meaningful, the answer to which is… Prolonged, worried shrug? The new "guardrails" in the contracts have a few hard protections—studios have to tell you, 48 hours in advance, if a job you're being offered will require you to be digitally scanned, so at least you're not having to decide that issue in the moment, in front of the scanner and all its terrible digital eyes. At the same time, though, it's acknowledged that any real hesitation from the studios to play around with this stuff has less to do with union contracts, and more with worries that studios won't be able to copyright stuff they make with AI-generated material, which is going to end up getting settled in the courts, not at the negotiating table. And the question of writers having their work used and scraped for training data without compensation is still open to an extent we might describe as "gaping;" it got kicked down the road, like a lot of AI stuff as the strikes threatened to stretch into perpetuity, and is now simply... a prolonged, worried shrug.All of which leaves an impression of those most irritating kinds of success: Incremental and compromised. (Except in terms of streaming money, where it seems like the studios are just still getting away with murder.) Guys like Netflix's Ted Sarandos have made it clear they're going to keep poking the AI bear, specifically, until something explodes: In that light, it's hard not to see the whole ordeal as merely prologue to the next big fight.
