After five months of strike in Hollywood, screenwriters return to work

The leaders of the Writers Guild of America (WGA), the powerful screenwriters’ union, approved, Tuesday, September 26 evening, the recent salary agreement concluded with the studios, after a strike which lasted almost five months and paralyzed Hollywood.

The union’s board of directors “voted unanimously to recommend the agreement” salary, he said on X, formerly Twitter. “The strike ends at 12:01 a.m.”Los Angeles time, this Wednesday.

Concretely, the agreement can theoretically still be rejected by the 11,500 screenwriters represented by the WGA in the United States: it must be the subject of a vote, which will take place “between October 2 and 9”, announced the union. But most industry experts believe that the ratification of this agreement, which includes “significant gains” in terms of remuneration as well as protections to regulate the use of artificial intelligence, should be a formality.

Actors still on strike

While waiting for the process to be completed, industry professionals will be able to return to work on Wednesday. Many American series and films stuck in the early stages of writing will thus be able to be restarted. Late-night talk shows, hosted by hosts who need scripts, are also expected to return to the air sometime next month.

But even after the final ratification of the screenwriters, Hollywood will still be far from a return to normal. Because the actors, represented by the SAG-AFTRA union, are still on strike. A resolution to this social conflict, which has been going on since mid-July, could take several more weeks. Because some of SAG-AFTRA’s demands go further than those of the WGA.

The negotiations therefore promise to be difficult. Especially since the studios know that what they release to the actors will serve as a standard for the technical professions in the industry, whose collective agreements must be renewed next year.

Even after the actors return to work, it will surely still take months to really get everyone back on set and catch up on the backlogs accumulated by a myriad of Hollywood productions.

Guarantees regarding artificial intelligence

The WGA also published Tuesday evening the details of the agreement reached with the studios, the exact content of which had not been filtered since its conclusion on Sunday. The compromise shows that the studios have given in to most of the demands put forward by the union and seems to represent a victory for the writers.

It notably includes a bonus when a series or film meets a certain success on a streaming platform, that is to say when “20% or more of the service’s national subscribers” watch the production “within the first 90 days of its release”.

In terms of artificial intelligence, the screenwriters have also obtained guarantees so as not to be replaced by robots. The agreement allows them to rework scripts initially generated by an AI, while being considered the sole author of this work, and therefore without being less remunerated.

A clause also provides that “the exploitation of the screenwriters’ material to train the AI ​​is prohibited”. In other words, robots cannot be fed scripts from syndicated creators to improve their narrative capabilities. A point on which the studios had long remained silent.