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Okay, so there was one good deal point –one– to come out of the AMPTP talks with the WGA, as SAG-AFTRA National Executive director and Chief Negotiator Duncan Crabtree-Ireland admitted at TIFF today: It was the streamer’s transparency on viewership numbers.
“It’s a good first step,” he told Deadline today after his appearance onstage at the Canadian Broadcasting Centre.
But let’s get real.
“It didn’t come paired with any money,” he continued, “It was a proposal to share data with a limited set of viewers with the Writers Guild and they would come back in three years to potentially negotiate over what they thought it would be.”
“We’re not waiting three years to see where streaming is going, we know where streaming is going,” Crabtree-Ireland told Deadline on the streets of Toronto.
As it stands, writers and actors get paid on syndicated movies and TV series that aren’t dependent on viewership numbers. Meaning, in plain person’s talk: It doesn’t matter how many people are watching an X-Men movie on FX for the cast or scribes to get paid.
If a deal is made whereby writers or actors are paid on viewership, will that mean strictly that those of the mostly-viewed shows like Wednesday and Stranger Things are the only folks who get paid, and nobody else? (Because after the big programs, nobody is really watching streaming? Certainly, Wall Street doesn’t want to know what all these billions are being showered on to yield dimly viewed content. One person close to Disney+’s Andor told us that the broadcast viewing of a handful of episodes will rain residual cash on them in a way that the series run on the OTT service will never.)
Here’s what Crabtree-Ireland had to say today to Deadline at TIFF:
“Our proposal is based on an algorithm that Parrot Analytics uses to value the financial contribution of the cast participations to a platform. That is what our proposal is; the concept is some measured focus of success.”
“So, if companies come back with an alternative of that, we would certainly consider,” answered Crabtree-Ireland.
“That’s why we made a proposal that wasn’t dependent on their transparency,” emphasized the SAG-AFTRA Chief Negotiator.
“Parrot Analytics proposal did not require them to give up any information because it uses other sources of information to evaluate. They made a proposal to Writers Guild that involves transparency as a viewership numbers,” added Crabtree-Ireland.
On Aug. 22, AMPTP unveiled their offer to WGA which underscored, a boost in SVOD residuals going from $72K WW to $87,5K per episode for three exhibition years.
Separately in his TIFF sitdown with Indiewire’s Anne Thompson at the Canadian Broadcasting Centre, Crabtree-Ireland explained that AMPTP’s studio negotiator Carol Lombardini “has the hardest job than any before” given the divided business philosophy between legacy studios like Disney, Warner Bros, Univeral, etc and those tech companies whereby content is only a sliver of their revenues next to their dedication to consumer products, i.e. Apple and Amazon.
Meanwhile, the Writers Guild told its members Friday that despite the united front the streamers and studios have shown in public during the scribe guild’s 130-day strike, several of the legacy companies privately have expressed “both the desire and willingness to negotiate an agreement that adequately addresses writers’ issues.”
One studio executive even told the guild that “they needed a deal badly,” the WGA said.
Crabtree-Ireland opined today at TIFF onstage, “They (the studios) want to keep labor contracts frozen like they were in the ’90s.”
“If you want to change how the business works, you have to have the labor contracts evolve.”
To date, SAG-AFTRA says they haven’t officially heard from studios to return to the table for talks.
Today is day 57 of the SAG-AFTRA strike.
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