Well, it’s begun. SAG-AFTRA formally started their strike on Thursday after negotiations with the studios broke down.
Being on strike doesn’t simply imply actors can’t act. It additionally means they will’t do promo — one of many extra labor-intensive elements of their job. No press junkets, interviews in help of the film, no Jimmy Kimmel, no Hot Ones, no Emmys, no Comic-Con, no pink carpet, nada.
The first casualty? The premiere of Oppenheimer.
While the strike technically begins at midnight, El Lay time, we realized from director Christopher Nolan that his stars had walked out of the premiere the second the choice was official. Nolan confirmed Cillian Murphy and Emily Blunt left. It’s unclear if the opposite stars in attendance, together with Florence Pugh, Matt Damon, and Robert Downey Jr., adopted swimsuit. But with the vote to strike hitting a reported 98% we think about they had been all very a lot in help. They had simply sufficient time to pose on the pink carpet after which…
BYE!
The studio was nearly actually counting on the unbelievably star-studded solid to promote this movie, and now they will say goodbye to that. We’d guess Oppenheimer goes to be damage way over Barbie, which hilariously comes out the identical day, because the model title recognition of the A-bomb inventor is marginally much less. But clearly not having viral TV interviews and web movies with Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling goes to harm that movie’s hype, too.
Related: Stars Show Support For WGA Strike!
Yes, the studios have actually shot themselves within the foot on this one — and for what? Greed? The unwillingness to make sure actors (and writers earlier than them) proceed to be pretty compensated because the trade evolves? As Matt Damon identified when requested concerning the strike on the Oppenheimer carpet, simply minutes earlier than it occurred, it’s not the film stars who’re being screwed right here — it’s the little guys. He defined:
“26,000 bucks a year is what you have to make to get your health insurance, and there are a lot of people who, residual payments are what carry them across that threshold. If those residual payments dry up, so does their healthcare, and that’s absolutely unacceptable.”
Matt Damon talks concerning the potential actors’ strike whereas on the “Oppenheimer” photocall in London. pic.twitter.com/sFzy77PKPN
— AP Entertainment (@APEntertainment) July 12, 2023
For those that don’t know, residuals are the funds actors proceed to obtain as films and TV exhibits get performed time and again within the years after they make them. After all, the studios are nonetheless profiting off of one thing you labored on, together with your likeness in it, so that you get that teeny tiny proportion of the revenue. With streaming it’s been tough — Paramount+ isn’t precisely enjoying films and exhibits, they’re simply offering entry to them. All the time. So how does fee get calculated? If the studios had their manner, the reply would apparently be that fee simply by no means occurs.
Yes, the most recent development in streaming is making an attempt to chop prices wherever attainable to maximise income — and which means discovering methods to screw over employees from getting their residuals.
Have you observed how Netflix will cancel a present after simply two weeks? Before anybody even will get an opportunity to listen to about whether or not it’s good or not? Apparently that’s so that they don’t need to pay as a lot. Numerous stuff like that’s what the union is combating.
And then there’s the query of A.I. As know-how evolves, companies are looking for methods to interchange employees they need to pay with ones they don’t. It got here out this week that one of many sticking factors provided within the contract with SAG was that extras may very well be paid a single day’s work to have their likeness scanned after which utilized in any kind, ceaselessly, with no requirement to ask consent. Would YOU wish to be paid $50 one time solely to see your self in a background orgy on House Of The Dragon three years later??
All that has led to the primary time since 1980 that actors have gone on strike. It’s additionally the primary time in 63 years that each actors and writers are putting collectively. The final time Ronald Reagan was the president… of SAG. The studios could have thought they might wait whereas the 11,000 WGA members went broke and misplaced their houses (an AMPTP supply actually stated that was the plan), however now the whole lot stops. The Screen Actor’s Guild is 160,000 robust, and Hollywood does NOT work, not even just a little bit, with out them.
If you continue to suppose that is only a bunch of wealthy Tinseltown pricks getting grasping, take a second and take into consideration your job, and the roles of individuals you understand and love. How a lot of them are beneath companies attempting to interchange people with machines? As Fran Drescher put in her fiery speech asserting the strike:
“What’s happening to us is happening across all fields of labor.”
See her highly effective phrases in opposition to the grasping monstrosity attempting squeeze out employees of every kind (beneath):
[Image via MEGA/WENN.]
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