Actors across Hollywood will resume talks with studios and streaming services on Monday, with confirmation coming as details from the Writers Guild of America (WGA) agreement come to light.
Negotiators from the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Radio and Television Artists will sit down to discuss a new contract for actor working conditions on Monday.
Actors have been on strike for more than two months, in solidarity with the writers’ strike, which led to a complete shutdown of movie and film production.
The actor-studio negotiation announcement came on Wednesday, the same day the nearly five-month-long writers’ strike formally ended.
With the screenwriters’ strike finally coming to an end, Monday will also see TV’s late-night hosts return to the air.
The return of scripted shows remains in the air until actors strike their deal with studios and streaming services.
The update for actors’ talks came with the Tuesday night approval of the contract agreement between writers and the studios, with details of the three-year deal now coming to light.
Writers scored big wins across the board in the main areas they had fought for, including compensation, length of employment, staff size, and control of artificial intelligence (AI).
The union sought minimum increases in pay and future residual earnings from shows and will get a raise of 3.5 and 5%, which was more than the studios had initially offered.
The writers’ guild also negotiated new residual payments based on the popularity of streaming shows.
Writers will now get bonuses for being a part of the most popular shows on Netflix, Max and other services; a proposal studios initially rejected.
On artificial intelligence, the writers got the regulation and control of the emerging technology they had sought.
Under the contract, raw, AI-generated storylines will not be regarded as “literary material” — a term in their contracts for scripts and other story forms a screenwriter produces, which means human writers will not compete with computers for screen credits.
AI-generated stories will instead be considered “source” material, which is the contractual language used for novels, video games or other works that writers may adapt into scripts.
Writers have the right under the deal to use artificial intelligence in their process if the company they are working for agrees and other conditions are met.
Companies, however, cannot require a writer to use artificial intelligence.
The three-year agreement matches or nearly equals what the writers’ union had sought at the outset of the strike.
