THERE'S AN AGREEMENT IN THE WGA STRIKE - UPDATED

It’s been announced here tonight that there is an agreement between the Writer’s Guild of America (WGA) and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP).

“We can say, with great pride, that this deal is exceptional – with meaningful gains and protections for writers in every sector of the membership,” said the WGA negotiating committee in a letter to membership. As the lawyers hammer out the details, the guild is not yet sharing the exact terms of the contract.

“What remains now is for our staff to make sure everything we have agreed to is codified in final contract language. And though we are eager to share the details of what has been achieved with you, we cannot do that until the last ‘i’ is dotted. To do so would complicate our ability to finish the job. So, as you have been patient with us before, we ask you to be patient again – one last time.”

The negotiating committee has to vote on whether to recommend the agreement and send it to the WGA West board and WGA East council for approval; those two vote on authorizing a ratification.

The guild emphasized that “no one is to return to work” and that writers are still technically on strike until they get the go-ahead. But all picketing has been halted for now — though the WGA is encouraging writers to continue to join performers on the ongoing SAG-AFTRA strike, which is now on Day 73.

Less than an hour after the WGA released its memo, the guild and studios issued a very brief joint statement through the AMPTP’s recently hired crisis PR firm, The Levinson Group:

“The WGA and AMPTPT [sic] have reached a tentative agreement.”

The full letter to membership says that the tentative agreement will be shown to the boards of WGA West and East simultaneously on Tuesday and they will vote Tuesday night.

The agreement will be made public on Wednesday, and submitted to the membership for a vote to approve.

The announcement came three days short of the record 150 days of the 1988 strike, the longest in WGA history.

That is all. I guess it’s enough.

UPDATE SUNDAY NIGHT: Matthew Belloni, whose sources in Hollywood are always the best, reports as follows:

According to sources in and around the final negotiations, no voices were raised, and nobody stormed out of the room during this final stretch. But the studios made it clear that if there wasn’t a deal this weekend—and preferably before the Yom Kippur sundown—they were planning to move on to SAG-AFTRA. The in-person meetings of the past week gave way to Zoom yesterday and today. The studio side complained that the guild didn’t know how to close, that they kept coming back with more and more and more. The guild complained that they hit a wall on Thursday, when the studios outright said they wouldn’t negotiate on a couple favored issues. Both sides, under incredible pressure from their constituencies after a 146 day strike, recognized that the deadline was today or potentially weeks from now.

So who won? That’s impossible to tell tonight. But the spin has already started. The guild is using the “exceptional” and “meaningful gains” language, though it hasn’t quite elevated the framing to “historic” (yet). And while the studios are saying nothing—last thing they want is to disrupt an un-papered deal—it’s clear that the top negotiators (Disney’s Bob Iger, NBCUniversal’s Donna Langley, Netflix’s Ted Sarandos, Warner Bros. Discovery’s David Zaslav) felt a sense of urgency. (A sense that, arguably, they should have felt months ago.) Oh, and the heads of the companies that weren’t in the room—Sony, Paramount, Amazon, and Apple—would very much like you to know they were heavily involved and constantly monitoring the situation from afar.

More details will come out this week, but we’ve confirmed from sources that lead negotiators Chris Keyser, David Goodman, and Ellen Stutzman achieved broad protections against AI, though the studios kept certain rights to experiment. (Determining that contract language was actually what stretched the final negotiations into Sunday.) The writers also got certain levels of minimum staffing based on the number of episodes of a TV show, though not the guaranteed level that they wanted. They didn’t get a strike recognition clause, which would have allowed the WGA to respect other unions’ picket lines. And on the all-important transparency issue, it’s still unclear how significant the gains actually were. The new residuals scheme contemplates bonuses based on consumption—the more a title is watched, the higher the residual—and that’s a big deal. But what those bonus benchmarks are, and how much access the guild will have to that data, is not clear. We’ll be following up on that issue.

What happens next? Now that the WGA has reached a deal, the governing board of the WGA West and council of the WGA East need to vote on it. They’ll endorse it, of course, but that will come on Tuesday, after the holiday, and they’ll take a few more days to prepare voting materials for the membership, who then will have two or three weeks to approve the deal. Until that approval occurs, the deal isn’t official, and writers normally can’t return to work—unless the guild says otherwise, which leadership says is their goal. No word yet on how soon that will happen, though the late-night shows could be first to return.

This strike has coincided with the bursting of a content bubble and a market correction in streaming. So the studios and streamers (maybe with the exception of Netflix) will almost certainly be pulling back, post-strike. That doesn’t mean the A-plus paydays and overall deals will go away. But it does mean the middle-class writers on a show who might have been rewarded with overalls might not get them, and the studios, in canceling a number of shows that had previously been renewed, have shown they may be a little more willing to make cuts to guild members that just waged a five month war. The divide between working writers/showrunners and the bottom of the guild is already vast, and post-strike it will likely get wider.

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