Studio CEOs are apparently trying to find the guys who caused the strike
A new report seemingly confirms what we've long suspected: Self-awareness is in short supply at the AMPTP
For more than 120 days, members of the Writers Guild of America have been sweating it out on the picket lines. Frustrated by decreasing job security, a lack of residuals, the encroaching threat of A.I.-generated gobbledygook, and reliable profits for studios (with sizable bonuses for CEOs for those profits), the writers who gave birth to studios’ billion-dollar franchises have been waiting for the studios to meet their demands. And yet, the strike continues.
Over these four months, the studios via the AMPTP have occasionally returned to the bargaining table with proposals that the WGA described as “neither nothing, nor nearly enough.” If anything, the lack of movement on the strike further confirms the ominous and anonymous quotes in Deadline that studio heads want to drag this out “until union members start losing their apartments and losing their houses,” which, given housing costs in Los Angeles, there’s reason to believe this is already happening. They’ve even hired another crisis P.R. firm to help the studios look a little less responsible for this mess, even though they could quickly make it all disappear.
Anyway, all that’s to say, we still don’t know who caused this strike, and neither does Disney CEO Bob Iger nor Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav—at least if Deadline’s sources are to be believed. Various CEOs reportedly met yesterday as tensions within the group mounted. Apparently, the “thin-skinned” and “stunned” Iger and Zaslav cannot believe they’re being held responsible for all this. Simply put, the guys who run Disney and Warners Bros. Discovery aren’t accountable for their actions. We’re all trying to find the guys responsible for hiring a millionaire crisis P.R. consultant to tell The New York Times that writers hate the Cheesecake Factory. We’re all trying to find the guys responsible for cutting the trees outside Universal that provided necessary shade for strikers immediately following the hottest two weeks in Earth’s history. We’re all trying to find the guys who refuse to regulate the use of AI. We’re all trying to find the guys refusing to staff minimums, sharing viewership information, and giving up less than 1% of studio revenues to the writers.
They’re all wearing a hot dog costume in a men’s store, peeling as many suits as possible off the rack and arguing they didn’t do this. Unfortunately, the public knows who did, and it’s going to take some real imagineering to get them to feel otherwise.