There will be no fresh helpings of The White Lotus, The Last of Us or even Emily in Paris beaming into front rooms when summer fades. Nor will a screen version of the musical Wicked, starring Ariana Grande, be showing in your local cinema in the spring. And all shooting on Gladiator 2 in Morocco is likely to be indefinitely paused. Already, the wails are almost audible.
On this, the first weekend of the American screen actors’ strike, the level of frustration registered by film and TV drama fans around the world has dwarfed earlier reactions to the equivalent writers’ strike, running since the beginning of May.
Since negotiations collapsed in Los Angeles on Thursday, the gloves are off in a fight over the way the streaming services are seen to be pushing down pay and investing in the use of artificial intelligence in production.
And if an industrial relations struggle benefits from a dose of charisma, then the battle to secure the income of the talent behind a large proportion of the world’s streaming content suddenly has much more of the right ingredient. On Friday, George Clooney became the latest celebrity to back the campaign. “Actors and writers in large numbers have lost their ability to make a living,” the actor said, going on to speak of “an inflection point in our industry”.
The recognisability of many of the faces now taking a stand, from Clooney to Margot Robbie and Brian Cox, compared to their counterparts inside the writers’ rooms, has brought the Hollywood dispute to the top of the international news agenda. Productions involving leading American talent, stalled in many countries ever since work on scripts has been prohibited, will now probably grind to a near standstill. And the actors say they are prepared for a long fight.
Among them is Barbie star Robbie, who has stepped out of promotional events, and Oscar winner Susan Sarandon, who argued this weekend that “the issues of streaming and AI are things that have to be dealt with now”. “We’re in an old contract for a new type of business and it’s just not working for most people,” the actor told reporters in New York.
Sarandon’s words follow a protest move in London on Thursday when the stars of the new Christopher Nolan film, Oppenheimer, walked out of the premiere. Emily Blunt, Cillian Murphy and Florence Pugh left with Matt Damon, whose new production company with Ben Affleck is also set to suffer, he said. The cast had the support of the British director Nolan, who has spoken of the moment being ripe for action. Monday’s red carpet event ahead of the New York premiere of Nolan’s film is also cancelled. “In support of the ongoing SAG strike, the film-makers of Oppenheimer will instead screen the movie to celebrate the crew and craftspeople who contributed to making this film,” said a statement from Universal.
Festivals and fan events are threatened too. Organisers of the Toronto International film festival still hope it will go ahead in early September and have told the BBC: “The impact of this strike on the industry and events like ours cannot be denied. We urge our partners and colleagues to resume an open dialogue.” The Venice festival scheduled next month is also in jeopardy, and San Diego’s Comic-Con could be held without its main attraction – celebrities.
On Friday, more than 160,000 members of the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (Sag-Aftra) stopped work, joining the 11,500 members of the Writers Guild of America in the biggest strike for more than 60 years. Both writers and actors were negotiating with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers over residuals, the payments made when a show or film is repeated. Streaming services such as Netflix have large audiences because of their big libraries of films and shows and yet they pay much less in residuals than broadcast television.
Actor Fran Drescher, the serving president of Sag-Aftra known for her role in The Nanny, claims responses from studio and streaming bosses so far have been “insulting and disrespectful”.
Her sentiments have been echoed by Cox, the Scottish actor behind Succession’s ruthless Logan Roy. “If our residuals go down, it means our health insurance isn’t going to be met,” he said on Friday. “The streaming services have shot themselves in the foot because they’ve said, ‘We’re going very well on this front.’ And when we called them to task and said, ‘What about our residuals, what about our money?’ everything kind of closes down and … you know, it’s not going to happen.”
Cox also attacked plans to use AI programming to replicate talent. “There would never be an original voice,” he argued, citing the British writer behind Succession, Jesse Armstrong, and Mike White, the creator and sole writer of The White Lotus. “It would be some kind of copy monkey of the show. And that is unacceptable.”
If screen talent is now playing its part to the full, then the tough-talking industry moguls are also getting into character. On Thursday, ahead of the strike, Walt Disney CEO Bob Iger told CNBC that stoppages had come at “the worst time in the world”. “There’s a level of expectation that they have that is just not realistic, and they are adding to a set of challenges that this business is already facing, that is quite frankly, very disruptive,” he said.
Production companies in countries with a booming film unit economy, such as Britain, Ireland, Greece and Canada, are braced for an unprecedented slowdown. Speaking from an office above an empty studio soundstage at Brightlight, the Canadian film-maker Shawn Williamson told the BBC that the Canadian entertainment industry depends on American writers and actors. Brightlight was the base for shows including ABC’s The Good Doctor and Firefly Lane on Netflix and makes up to nine shows at a time. “All of these things are now on hold while we wait for the studios and the unions to sort things out,” said Williamson.
In Britain and other European countries, the national acting and writing unions are monitoring the damage. And the technical unions representing crew and support industries share the sense of foreboding. Bectu, the union for the British creative industries, has warned that a “perfect storm is brewing” for freelancers. Many productions are now at risk of going into hiatus, it believes, and it expects others will follow if mediation fails.
Although the writers’ strike, which prevents all editing and even work-related emails, has already had an impact on location filming in many countries, it is the actors’ solidarity that is clamping down on productions. This autumn and winter there will be less scripted entertainment, with fewer stars to admire and fewer stories to enjoy.
The set of Wicked in Buckinghamshire, where Grande was set to portray Glinda the Good, has been abandoned. Beetlejuice, filming at Leavesden, and Deadpool 3 are all said to be significantly affected, but HBO’s House of the Dragon may escape as it has a largely non-American cast. Actors are also believed to be cancelling sound recording sessions on films that have already been shot.
British location manager Ben Sanderson is calling for more help for all those in support industries. “It’s freelance film production professionals who will, at a moment’s notice, not be earning a wage. I have had numerous phone calls of worried individuals just in the department I work in,” he told the Observer.
Film production in Britain employs around 100,000 people, both directly and indirectly, and was worth £12.9bn before the pandemic. Overnight, a lot of these people are now unemployed. So while viewers cope with an upcoming lack of new entertainment, others are facing a lack of pay. There is real pain now that will touch more than famous faces who are waving placards.
