Words: Tom Ward
Early Netflix DVD mail orders, 2002
The Writers Guild of America (WGA) and SAG (Screen Actors Guild) continue their strike after failing to come to terms with media moguls over issues of pay, and job assurances. WAG was the first union to go out on strike last month, with SAG joining them a week or so afterwards. Actors even walked out of the Oppenheimer premier as the SAG strike was announced in the middle of it.
Several high profile actors such as Jeremy Allen White, Jane Fonda and Bob Odenkirk have joined the picket lines, while the likes of Meryl Streep and Leonardo DiCaprio donated millions of dollars to support the strike.
DON’T LOOK UP, LEONARDO DICAPRIO as DR. RANDALL MINDY. Cr. NIKO TAVERNISE/NETFLIX © 2021
Speaking to the Wall Street Journal’s podcast last Saturday, Nelson Franklin, a former regular on the ABC show Blackish explained that most writers at his level – i.e. not the Matt Damons of the world – are able to make a middle class living, contrary to the idea that everyone on TV is raking it in. As Damon himself explained on the YouTube show Hot Ones, actors used to make a good deal of money from residuals, money they would earn when their project was re-shown on TV, or from DVD sales. Streaming services have killed this, paying a flat fee for a performance, with no follow-up cash. Those on strike are asking for residuals from streaming, while the platforms say figuring this out given their current algorithms would be impossible.
What’s more, the streamers say they aren’t as flush with money as everyone thinks. Writing for The Atlantic, Sonny Bunch (not a phrase used to describe Netflix executives right now) opined that “An extended strike could kill off movie theaters.” He writes: “The studios and their corporate overlords look at Netflix’s stock price and revenues and wonder why they can’t print money too. This is why the studios were all planning their own jumps to streaming even before the pandemic began. After the pandemic started, they jumped in feet first—and promptly found themselves drowning.”
Bunch explains that most major streaming platforms are currently money-losing ventures. Peacock has lost $2.5bn in 2022, despite its parent company Comcast promising it would never lose more than $1bn through 2020-2024. It’s now down over $5bn in that period. Meanwhile Netflix lost nearly a million subscribers last year – hence the controversial effort to reduce password sharing, thereby encouraging more individual sign-ups.
Another source of contention is the use of A.I. in films. Recent Disney offerings like the new Indiana Jones film and multiple Star Wars films have seen actors de-aged to portray younger versions of classic characters once again. Multiple studios were reportedly toying with the idea of using similar technology to pay a background actor for a day’s work, then digitally recreate their likeness, effectively owning it in perpetuity, instead of pay extras. With this, Hollywood edges ever closer to dystopia; it’s Orwellian and Ballardian at the same time.
Ever since OpenAI (whose motto is “Creating safe AGI that benefits all of humanity”) launched ChatGPT last November, there’s been increasing concern that it would displace writers in the workforce, in the same way electronic supermarket checkouts have cut down the number of uniformed, petulant teenagers in your local tesco. You can task AI services like ChatGPT to write a Michael Mann film and based on every Mann film out there, every interview he’s given and scrap of information about his interests and current events it will come up with something at least passable. And that’s a year into the process. Imagine how accurate this will be after a few years of refinement.
In an attempt to navigate this (or at least, appear like they’re trying to do so) studios like Netflix and Disney are hiring A.I. ‘experts’ with Netflix posting a $900,000 per annum job listing for an ‘AI product manager’. Amazon and Apple are also on the hunt while Sony is willing to pay up to $160,000 for an AI ‘ethics engineer’.
Strikes continue, but what is clear is that this issue is unlikely to be resolved any time soon. With the studio’s commitment to A.I. clearly moving ahead, writers will be wondering where this leaves them. “Predicting when the strike will end has become Hollywood’s favorite parlor game, with guesses ranging from fall to, at their most extreme, early next year,” writes Natalie Jarvey in Vanity Fair.
Should writers and actors be forced out of the business due to not being able to support themselves, its unsettling to imagine a TV schedule filled with shows written by robots, with computer-generated facsimiles of actors we know parroting their lines. Surely, it’s up to us as viewers to push back on this before it happens. Yes, seeing a young Luke Skywalker in The Mandalorian is fun. But it’s also pretty creepy too.
BECKETT (2021) John David Washington as Beckett and Boyd Holbrook as Tynan. Cr: Yannis Drakoulidis/NETFLIX
For now, it means shows like White Lotus and Stranger Things, and films like Gladiator 2 are stuck in limbo. Whether A.I and the studios win, or they’re able to see sense one thing is certain: your autumn TV schedule just got a whole lot emptier.
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