Actors now poised to go on strike...

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

Just saw this. Lets hope this doesn't actually happen...

[Jon Dent]

Well that escalated quickly. ComicCon is worried that they won't have any panels this year if the actors go on strike too.

[Bobby Henderson]

If the SAG goes on strike that will make it easier for me to cancel certain pay TV services.

[Mike Blakesley]

I guess this is what happens when you give away the store, devalue your product, and try to make up for it by gouging the creatives. Among all the other dumb things studios have done.

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

Contract negotiations between SAG-AFTRA and the AMPTP broke off tonight, and the guild’s national board will meet Thursday morning to formally approve the launch of a strike.

I guess UPS is next...

[Leo Enticknap]

And the writers are keeping it up. There was quite an impressive picket line outside the KTLA Channel 5 building when I drove past it yesterday.

[Frank Cox]

230722174907-04-opinion-cartoons-072223.jpgPlease enter a message with at least 10 characters

[Leo Enticknap]

The apostrophe is present and in the right place, suggesting to me that a WGA member was responsible for this cartoon.

[Frank Cox]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifes...av-strike-end/

Warner Bros. thinks the strike will end soon. Meanwhile, it’s saving millions.
The strike helped the company save more than $100 million, executives say

Warner Bros. Discovery expects that the Hollywood strike will end in a few weeks, executives said in a public earnings call Thursday. But even if actors and writers remain on the picket lines into next year, the studio is projecting hundreds of millions of dollars in savings as an “upside.”

Chief Financial Officer Gunnar Wiedenfels said a work stoppage by thousands of unionized writers in May resulted in more than $100 million in savings, which helped juice Warner’s free cash flow above projections — to $1.7 billion between April and June. The company reported about $10.4 billion in revenue for the quarter, though it still lost $1.2 billion.

Analysts expect Warner’s free cash flow to remain strong next quarter, which will include the impact of tens of thousands of unionized actors who joined the strike in July, shutting down almost all remaining production in Hollywood.

Disney CEO Bob Iger previously said the historic double strike came at “the worst time in the world” for the entertainment industry, and a negotiating group representing all the major studios has portrayed the union’s demands for more pay as unreasonable as Hollywood recovers from early pandemic shutdowns.

But Warner executives sounded relatively sanguine as they spoke to investors and analysts about the strike’s future impact.

“While we are hoping for a fast resolution, our modeling assumes a return to work date in early September,” Wiedenfels said on Thursday’s call. “Should the strikes run through the end of the year, I would expect several hundred million dollars of incremental upside to our free cash flow guidance and some incremental downside” in earnings.

Warner chief executive David Zaslav, however, made the point that his company can’t save its way into profitability if it has no actors or writers willing to make new projects.

“We’re in the business of storytelling,” Zaslav said. “We cannot do any of that without the entirety of the creative community — the great creative community. Without the writers, directors, editors, producers, actors, the whole below-the-line crew. Our job is to enable and empower them to do their best work. We’re hopeful that all sides will get back to the negotiating room soon and that these strikes get resolved in a way that the writers and actors feel they are fairly compensated and their efforts and contributions are fully valued.”

The Writers Guild of America, which represents the striking writers, agreed to meet with negotiators for the studios on Friday — the first time the two sides have formally spoken since the strike began three months ago.

[Leo Enticknap]

The best analogy I can think of here is of a truck driver saying that a week without work is great, because he's saving on visits to the gas station. OK, his outgoings are down, but so will his income be in a week's time. Warners still have fixed costs that aren't going away (infrastructure, buildings, paying staff who aren't on strike), but the longer the actors and writers are out, the longer the dip in income to pay for them will be, because they aren't churning out the movies and TV shows that generate it. Due to the lag in the release cycle, Warners isn't feeling this now, but they will start to in a few weeks.

[Bobby Henderson]

Unfortunately the commercial cinemas will probably be among the first to feel the negative effects of this strike. As the flow of new movies gets shut off the theaters will be left with some not so great choices. I expect some locations may simply shut down, temporarily at first and perhaps permanently if the strike drags on a fatal length of time. Some theater locations may be in a better position to play other kinds of content, such as foreign movies or even other kinds of events like concerts and mixed martial arts tournaments. I can see that strategy possibly being successful in larger, more affluent (and higher educated) locations. It's not going to work at all in a town like mine where people tend to show up only for major American studio releases.

Some locations in big cities might be able to use 70mm equipment to run large format film prints. In such a case hopefully the movie studios would strike new prints of certain titles rather than expose the existing limited number of prints to further use and abuse. This sort of solution would only work for a small fraction of cinemas.