SAG-AFTRA has officially joined the WGA by going on strike.
After initially extending talks with the AMPTP from the June 30 deadline through July 12, the actors guild formally called for a strike during a press conference on July 13 led by SAG-AFTRA president Fran Drescher and lead negotiator Duncan Crabtree.
With Hollywood already largely shut down this summer by the writers strike, which has been ongoing since May 2, the actors strike will complicate things even further.
First and foremost, all production will now be forced to shut down completely. Prior to this, some projects had managed to stay up and running by working off of already completed scripts and simply not having any writers on set — including big-budget productions like the second season of HBO’s “House of the Dragon.” Amazon just recently wrapped filming on Season 2 of “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power” in the U.K., making it one of the priciest shows to come in under the wire. PvNew has confirmed that “House of the Dragon” will remain in production, however.
Granted, picketing by the WGA had managed to force some shows, mainly in Los Angeles and New York, to suspend production indefinitely, but now with no actors either, filming will come to a standstill.
This will further hurt the networks and streamers, who are relying on their pipeline of already completed shows to fill out their release schedules for the remainder of the year. Now they will have no hope of completing any productions until both strikes are resolved. That leads to the mega media corps that own all these entities having a rough Q2 earnings season ahead.
C-suite execs at Netflix (which kicks off Hollywood’s second-quarter earnings season July 19), Disney, Paramount, Comcast, Warner Bros. Discovery, Fox and more TV and film companies will be inundated with analysts’ questions about how the actors strike — on top of the writers strike — will affect their bottom lines in the second half of the year. And it’s likely they won’t have great answers, considering all of these companies are already experiencing extreme belt-tightening amid an uncertain economy and years of gluttonous content spend.
Then there are the myriad of events for which Hollywood is so famous. The upcoming San Diego Comic-Con has already been heavily impacted, with most major studios stating they will not have their usual massive presence on the convention floor and in the famous Hall H amid the writers strike. Without actors in attendance, any hopes of pulling together some TV panels are gone. Some studios may still attempt to hold panels for animated shows or projects where a director may be able to represent, but the chances of the star-studded event fans have come to expect are essentially nil.
Emmy season is its own mess, with nominations having been announced Wednesday, just hours before time ran out on the SAG-AMPTP negotiation extension. FYC campaigns for the first phase of voting were already difficult to coordinate, as the writers strike made including creators and showrunners impossible, and now the second phase will be a complete nightmare for publicity teams who can’t use actors either.
Summer movie promotion for blockbusters “Barbie,” “Oppenheimer” and “Mission: Impossible 7,” films that have large-scale, pricey marketing campaigns, is now a giant question mark for the studios to answer quickly as scheduled release dates are upon us. The cast of “Oppenheimer” walked away from the highly-anticipated film’s premiere in London in anticipation of the strike being called.
