Hollywood’s High-Stakes Strike: Actors and Writers Make History With Bid to Reshape Industry

The beginning of what may be a more militant era in Hollywood studio-labor relations has been ushered in, with actors joining writers on the picket lines in a major stand against film and TV producers that will effectively shut down the industry during the impasse.

On July 13, SAG-AFTRA, led by president Fran Drescher, called the union’s first strike against film and television companies in 43 years. Combined with Hollywood writers’ ongoing strike, the work stoppage — applying to 160,000 members, from actors to singers to dancers — marks the first simultaneous strike by the two unions since 1960, in a sign of an industry in tumult.

“We are the victims here. We are being victimized by a very greedy entity,” Drescher said at a press conference July 13. The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which reps the studios, countered with a talking points memo it circulated that included an “AI proposal which protects performers’ digital likenesses.” Drescher, in her remarks, cast AI as one of many issues where there’s a wide gulf between studios and talent: “If we don’t stand tall right now, we are all going to be in trouble, we are all going to be in jeopardy of being replaced by machines.”

After talks fell apart, union leaders described negotiations as combative and emphasized that the AMPTP has “refused to meaningfully engage on some topics and on others completely stonewalled us.” The AMPTP said it offered pay and residual increases, higher caps on pension and health contributions, audition protections, shortened series options and AI protections. Drescher called the proposals “insulting and disrespectful of our massive contributions to this industry.” And so, after weeks of negotiations, the actors began assembling plans for picketing.

Compared to the writers strike, film and TV production will be halted faster and at a much larger scale with actors joining the picket lines — though, thanks to the writers’ standoff, there is scant union production work happening in New York and Los Angeles. Still, all remaining U.S. physical production with union performers will likely be immediately impacted by the strike. Shoots on major films and on ongoing television series are all expected to be immediately shut down once deprived of their top stars. “In some ways, this is the most important strike in Hollywood history because it’s over existential issues,” says Jonathan Kuntz, a film historian at the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television. “We’re entering an era of scarcity. This is about a shrinking pie that’s now being divvied up.” 

The immediate aftermath of the writers’ work stoppage, on the other hand, only ensnared late night shows, which rely on daily writing from scribes on news developments. News of several scripted productions shutting down trickled in, starting with Netflix’s Stranger Things, Apple TV+’s Loot and Marvel’s Blade, among other projects. The first wave of films and TV shows going on pause was due to the disruption of not having writers and showrunners on set as well as targeted union picketing of particular productions, forcing cast and crew to decide whether to cross a picket line.

This time around, with performers walking off the job, “the ripple effects and where that shuts things down nationally and globally will be very different to the writers strike,” predicts Kate Fortmueller, a University of Georgia entertainment and media studies professor whose research focuses on Hollywood labor.

When writers struck 15 years ago, the fallout of the 100-day labor stoppage was roughly $2 billion (or $2.8 billion in 2023 dollars). Experts who spoke with THR after the WGA’s May 1 call predicted the financial toll from this latest strike may be even greater. That figure undoubtedly will balloon now that productions will be further stalled by the work stoppage from the actors.

The last time actors went on strike, in 1980 (which lasted a record 95 days), Billy Hunt, then-chairman of the AMPTP’s predecessor, estimated that it cost the economy roughly $40 million a week in lost expenditures on goods and services. Just a day after the strike started, nearly 100 TV shows that were either in production or about to start were impacted, THR reported at the time. Layoffs among members of the industry’s guilds — including photographers, editors, studio electricians, janitors, grips, sound technicians, set painters, projectionists and publicists — were swift and far-reaching. Of nearly 24,000 union employees, roughly 12,200 were laid off, according to a Daily Variety poll that ran in Aug. 7, 1980. The hardest-hit employees were photographers, studio electricians, and makeup and hair stylists, per the poll. Publicists, janitors and film technicians suffered the fewest layoffs.

Most strikes by actors since 1960, notes USC history professor Steven Ross, who studies entertainment labor, have been waged largely over residuals, except this time there’s an “existential threat to writers and potentially to actors, and that is AI.”

During the 2023 round of negotiations, the union has been seeking to codify consent and compensation terms for performers when their work is ingested into AI technology, and create guardrails around potential uses. The AMPTP said it offered a “groundbreaking AI proposal which protects performers’ digital likenesses, including a requirement for performer’s consent for the creation and use of digital replicas or for digital alterations of a performance.” Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, SAG-AFTRA’s chief negotiator and national executive director, on July 13 denounced the proposal for only paying background performers for one day of work in exchange for the rights to their digital likeness “for the rest of eternity with no compensation.” He added, “If you think that’s a groundbreaking proposal, I suggest you think again.”

In a statement pinning blame for the work stoppage on SAG-AFTRA, the AMPTP detailed an offer that included “historic pay and residual increases, substantially higher caps on pension and health contributions, audition protections, shortened series option periods,” among other things.

When actors went on strike in July 1980 in a three-month work stoppage, they pushed for a system of profit-sharing to get a percentage of revenue from home media releases. SAG wanted to get ahead of what it believed would be a lucrative market (SAG merged with AFTRA in 2012). In an open letter, then-SAG chief negotiator Chester Migden stressed, “The rights of actors to a proper participatory share must be established early in the game” and that it’s “essential that the necessary principles be created now to insure the future.” Studio representatives maintained there was not enough money to share yet, pointing to just 2 percent of households owning a VCR at the time, according to Fortmueller in Below the Stars: How the Labor of Working Actors and Extras Shapes Media Production.

After SAG membership authorized a strike by a 91 percent margin, bargaining recessed for more than two weeks over an impasse on the issue. Industry observers predicted a long strike. By September, both sides remained deadlocked. After rejecting SAG’s original demand for 6 percent, studio management agreed to hand over 3.6 percent of gross income of home video market revenues but refused to trigger payouts until after the content had played for two years on pay TV or was released on videocassettes. SAG rebuffed the counteroffer, and it became apparent that revenue sharing for the home video market was the primary point of contention.

The union ultimately settled for 4.5 percent of gross revenues for home media releases and a 30 percent increase in residuals on top of 32.5 percent wage increases, among other improvements to employee benefits and protections.

For this most recent negotiation, SAG-AFTRA walked into the room on June 7 with an abnormal amount of leverage. With around 11,500 members of the WGA already on strike, SAG-AFTRA held a strike authorization vote even before sitting down to the bargaining table that ultimately nearly 98 percent of its voting members supported. And once the union was deep into negotiations in late June, a group of hundreds of high-profile members, including Meryl Streep, Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Jennifer Lawrence, signed a letter stating, “We are prepared to strike if it comes to that.”

Still, major studios and streamers accused of “plead[ing] poverty,” as Drescher put it at a SAG-AFTRA press conference July 13, had some context to point to in their own defense during this negotiations cycle. The industry has been aggressively cost-cutting since the Warner Bros.-Discovery merger in the spring of 2022, which was premised in part on CEO David Zaslav slashing $3.5 billion in costs to help reduce the company’s debt load. Netflix saw its stock price plummet in the same period after it lost nearly a million subscribers in one quarter, which led to Wall Street cooling on the entire streaming business, setting in motion a ripple effect of cutbacks that shook the entire entertainment industry. (Netflix stock has since rebounded as the company won over analysts who see a renewed revenue growth momentum.)

Rising losses in streaming prompted further belt-tightening from companies that had heavily invested in as-yet-unprofitable direct-to-consumer services in the past few years, with Paramount, Disney and AMC Networks, among others, shedding thousands of employees and canceling dozens of projects to try and right their ships. 

“Every 100 years, Hollywood thinks of new ways to sell us products, and it takes a while for the unions to catch up and get their fair share of these new markets,” Kuntz says. “We saw that with cable and home video. Now, of course, we’re confronting streaming.”

On July 13, Disney CEO Bob Iger may have signaled that the AMPTP is settling in for the long haul on a strike, saying on CNBC that the unions “have to be realistic about the business environment and what this business can deliver.”

And so far, 11 weeks into one strike and as another revs up, labor groups also appear to be ready to weather two potentially long work stoppages. Says Ross of striking workers, “This is no longer just about improving your wages and your benefits. This is about keeping your job in the future.”

Alex Weprin contributed to this report.

A version of this story first appeared in the July 14 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.