‘What Does Hollywood Want to Be?’

The strikes are over, but corporate entertainment’s identity crisis–cum–reckoning is far from resolved.

Depending on your vantage point, after six-plus months of Hollywood strikepocalypse, either every single aspect of the entertainment industry has been thrown up into the air for wholesale reevaluation or not much has changed at all. Last week’s agreement between the Screen Actors Guild and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers represents, according to the AMPTP, “the biggest contract-on-contract gains in the history of the union, including the largest increase in minimum wages in the last forty years.” The resolution secured better residuals for actors involved in streaming projects and protections in cases involving artificial intelligence, two issues paramount to the guild in an era when entertainment is dominated by tech companies.

But the monetary divide between what rank-and-file members of the actors and writers guilds pull in and the torrents of revenue harvested by streaming services and studios on the backs of those writers’ and actors’ labor remains more or less the same. Warner Bros. Discovery chief executive David Zaslav still makes 384 times the annual income of the average Hollywood script slinger, while a breathtaking 86 percent of union-affiliated actors squeak by earning less than $26,000 a year. As the fiery picket-line rhetoric and mordant placard comedy fades to black with last week’s resolution, neither SAG nor the Writers Guild of America, which ended its strike in September (and similarly amounted to AI protections for WGA members and a new residuals model, on top of gains in streaming transparency and staffing minimums), is quite yet able to assure the type of middle-class living wage for its bottom percentile they started advocating for back in May.

Yet as Hollywood reawakens from its cryogenic strike slumber, having incurred an estimated $7 billion in economic damages and with tens of thousands of showbiz and industry-adjacent jobs erased from payrolls, it’s impossible to claim the cultural and financial landscape is the same as before. In the still-painful dénouement of pandemic-era TV and movie supply-chain chaos, and not quite out from under the dark shadow of last year’s Great Netflix Panic, showbiz revenue streams have arguably never been more screwy. At least according to the studio executives, entertainment lawyers, top talent agents, managers, and corporate consiglieres canvassed by Vulture, who collectively see a world convulsed — not only by the now ironed-out negotiations, but by the abatement of Peak TV, the continuing theatrical diminution of anything except megabudget “event” movie releases, and the Barbenheimer-era franchise fatigue that resulted in such would-be blockbusters as Fast X, Indiana Jones 5, and Mission: Impossible 7 slinking unprofitably from cineplexes as failures.

This confluence of catastrophes has led to a kind of identity crisis–cum–day of reckoning among industry shot callers. “What does Hollywood want to be?” asks one corporate fixer who was involved in negotiations between SAG and the AMPTP. “Hollywood historically drove culture; it follows culture now. Now that the strikes are over, it needs to find its new stasis point. Where is it comfortable being, and what do people expect from it? There’s got to be a lot of rebuilding work — not just mending fences between guilds and studios. There’s got to be a vision of what Hollywood does going forward.”

While no one can be sure what that post-strike stasis point will be (let alone how it will be achieved), most insiders agree on a few certainties: The volume of movies, TV projects, and streaming series going into production will diminish to a trickle compared to the fire hose of content Hollywood has been blasting into the culture for the past decade or so. (Exhibit A: Disney’s recent earnings call announcing the studio’s plans to slash $25 billion in content spending next year.) And in the stampede to get back to business as usual, competition for finite resources such as soundstages and ADR recording facilities is going to be fast, furious, and punitively expensive when physical production on most series and movies gets going in January. Plus, with a growing number of summer ’24 tentpole movies still unfinished and unlikely to meet completion deadlines, next year’s release schedule is in for substantial restacking in a way bound to alter the financial complexion of box office’s hottest season. Most pressing, the money Hollywood lost while the AMPTP dragged its feet in meeting the guilds’ terms is never coming back.

“We haven’t seen what the final result is, but I find it hard to believe that it was all worth a strike,” says a prominent entertainment lawyer who has been involved in bargaining negotiations. “When is the community going to recover all the money it lost? It’s not happening.”

The Industry Remains Divided

The AMPTP and guilds were certainly at odds over the past several months, with battle lines clearly delineated between the WGA’s 11,500-strong membership, plus approximately 160,000 members of the actors guild, and what SAG president Fran Drescher indelibly characterized as the AMPTP’s “land barons of a medieval time.” But the strike managed to highlight both sides’ persistent internecine warfare, as well.

Inside the WGA, a cadre of marquee showrunners including Kenya Barris, Dan Fogelman, and Noah Hawley (whose overall deals would be less impacted by new residual agreements) publicly needled union reps for a speedier strike resolution while privately, an anonymous group of prominent writer-producers voiced reluctance to embrace one of the WGA’s key sticking points: a fixed minimum staff size for all shows. The actors weathered their own stratification. “It wasn’t the AA-list people dragging this out. The messy middle was speaking the loudest,” says one management executive, referring to the SAG members whose income is not totally derived from acting and who often take on other jobs to make a living. “They were in no rush to get this back on track because the more they could demand, when they do get a job, it’s that much more impactful for them.”

But perhaps the greatest nagging schism exists within the AMPTP itself, where Netflix came to be known as “one of the problem children,” helping stall negotiations out around residual increases (in particular, a proposed 2 percent share of streaming revenues for actors the service castigated and ultimately denied as “a bridge too far”) and greater transparency regarding streaming data. (Never mind that Big Red only joined the Alliance in 2021; “Supposedly Ted Sarandos threatens to leave all the time,” says one insider, referring to the Netflix chief executive.) Disney CEO Bob Iger’s recalcitrant CNBC Squawk Box utterance that writers’ and actors’ expectations were “not realistic” and “very disturbing to me” stood in stark contrast to the guarded tone taken by Sony chief executive–chairman Tony Vinciquerra — a guy whose studio is notably not attached to a streaming platform that would be required to participate in any new profit-sharing scheme. “We want to make a deal,” Vinciquerra said over the summer. “Even though there are a lot of headlines saying the opposite.”

In the end, all sides compromised. While an ecstatic group of actors gathered at Los Angeles’ All Season Brewing to toast the “next chapter in Hollywood” — what SAG-AFTRA describes as a historic $1 billion deal in benefit gains, wage enhancements, and AI safeguards that ended the longest strike in guild history — neither they nor the writers nor the AMPTP side could declare anything like outright victory. “It’s not like any one of them is standing there going, ‘Fuck yeah, we got this!’” says a corporate insider with knowledge of the negotiations. “None of them feel like masters of the universe. Secretly, the people who really know what’s going on all feel like shit.”

What’s more definite is what one source called the lasting “animosity factor,” which stands in contrast to the emotional tenor of the 2007–08 WGA strike resolution. “I recall when that strike ended, everyone just got back to work,” says this insider. “This one feels different for a variety of reasons. It was a big labor movement representing class-warfare income inequality. On social media, things got very personal. And you have to remember: Hollywood is a small town. We export our culture and it’s huge around the world. But as a business, it’s pretty minuscule when you compare it to other big business sectors. It’s a small business. It’s a relationship business.”

He continues, “If I was a studio executive and I knew that somebody carried a sign that was really personal or said something really shitty on Twitter, they’re not getting a fucking job at my studio. I think the idea of everyone coming back together and kumbaya and everything’s forgotten is a little unrealistic.”

A New Era of Belt-Tightening Begins

Strikes or not, Hollywood machers are prone to extolling a greater “focus on quality” and kicking around euphemistic terms like “selectivity” and “discipline” to characterize how they’ll decide what kind of projects will make the cut production-wise. And up first on the post-stoppage chopping block is a particularly stale kind of project: do-your-homework chapters of certain cinematic universes (the MCU’s Secret Invasion, impending miss The Marvels, we are talking to you) of which audiences have grown demonstrably tired.

“This year, you had movies like the Barbenheimer situation prove that when a filmmaker comes up with something fresh and pulls it off in an impressive way, the movie audience will flock to it,” says Roger Green, a partner at William Morris Endeavor who heads up the agency’s film group. “It’s all the more reason to — rather than just making the seventh or eighth version of a film franchise — think, Wait a second, let’s take a step back and figure out what is going to make people say, ‘Yeah, I have got to go buy a ticket and spend two hours in the theater.’ Hollywood’s just fallen into a pattern where they had certain franchises on the schedule and they just robotically go out and make them. That’s not going to cut it anymore.”

Selectivity is more necessary than ever as the basic costs of making TV and movie content dramatically rise. Coinciding with the concrete reality that most streaming services are cash sinkholes while major theater chains continue circling the drain of bankruptcy due to wild vicissitudes in audience turnout, even overdogs in the studio C-suites are feeling sorry for themselves. “In every situation, the corporate entity is going to be the villain. I hate corporations! They’re slow-moving dickish corporations designed to make money,” says one high-ranking studio executive. “But I will say our margins suck. Netflix themselves really put stress on our budgets. They’ve taken all the soundstages. Which means, you want a stage, you’re paying 50 percent more. You want a triple-A actor? ‘Yeah, it’s not 20 anymore; you want Ryan Reynolds, you’re paying $30 million.’ Jesus. And, ‘Oh, you want a director? We gave our directors $12 million. You want to pay him 6? It’s 12 now.’ So all the economics of the movie business has shifted.”

“Each company is going through their own existential crisis,” adds another top talent agent. “Like, ‘Who are we?’ Comcast: ‘Are we a buyer? Are we a seller? Do we need Hulu? Do we believe in Peacock?’ You’ve got David Zaslav, the most hated man in Hollywood. He’s just trying to figure out how not to get pilloried every day. Paramount Global CEO Bob Bakish, no one even knows who he is.”

A Mass Migration

What industry pundits have taken to calling the “dating game” kicked off in earnest in late July with MGM canceling the premiere of Challengers at the Venice Film Festival. At issue: Co-stars Zendaya, Josh O’Connor, and Mike Faist could not promote the art-house tennis-set ménage à trois under SAG-AFTRA strike protocols, resulting in the film’s wide theatrical release being pushed from September 2023 to April 2024. In August, Warner Bros. announced it was punting the release of Dune: Part Two from October 2023 to March 2024, with the sci-fi sequel’s A-list leads Timothée Chalamet and Zendaya (again) off-limits for promo duty. Then, days later, Sony followed suit, postponing the rollout of its October Spider-Man universe supervillain stand-alone Kraven the Hunter until August 2024.

Now, beyond a smattering of current awards-season titles being rescheduled to hit the inside of darkened auditoriums next year, a number of spring and summer’s biggest presumptive blockbusters have also pulled up stakes from popcorn movie season’s most prime real estate. Among them: Disney’s $330 million live-action adaptation of Snow White (moving from March 2024 to March 2025), Lionsgate’s Dirty Dancing 2 (February 2024 to summer ’25), Pixar’s outer-space romp Elio (March ’24 to June ’25), Deadpool 3 (originally due out May 3 but now reportedly without a definite release date), Venom 3 (July 2024 to November 2024), and the eighth installment of Mission: Impossible — which will no longer be subtitled Dead Reckoning Part Two, perhaps because moviegoers hate part twos — (June 2024 to May 2025).

Which is all but certain to trigger a mass migration of spring-scheduled films into event movie season. Toward that end, Paramount’s A Quiet Place prequel has already pushed off its March 8 rollout to arrive in theaters on June 28, 2024. Even money has Universal’s David Leitch–directed and Ryan Gosling–starring adaptation of the ’80s stuntman TV thriller The Fall Guy shifting from its scheduled March 1 release date into the summer. “There is going to be a lot more Tetris happening,” says another industry insider. “You’re going to see the pandemic thing that happened: The first studio that moves three big movies, everyone’s going to look at the schedule and go, ‘Now we’re moving our movies too.’”

Simmering just beneath the labor unrest compelling all that calendar reshuffling is what one former agent terms “disintermediation between audience and content.” That’s a fancy way to describe the pervasive uncertainty Hollywood creative types feel in the streaming era when a $22.99 Netflix subscription entitles viewers to nearly 4,000 movies and more than 1,800 shows a month — a kind of mass confusion born of “creators no longer being connected with their audiences in the way they used to be.” It’s an identity crisis an avalanche of release delays can’t solve.

“Hollywood has bigger problems than the strike,” this person says. “When was the last time the country had a monoculture moment? I can’t even think of it. It feels like it’s been years because of the broader splintering of American culture politically and culturally. So can Hollywood do that again? What’s it going to take? Bringing people together, creating that communal experience where they’re all actually in the same room — it’s … complicated.”