On June 6th, SAG-AFTRA overwhelmingly voted to approve a strike — 97.91% of its voting members supported the strike authorization act.
The actors guild now needs to reach a deal by June 30th otherwise they’re going on strike. Hollywood is already struggling with the writers strike, but if SAG also stops working then it’s a total shutdown.
To make things worse, Rolling Stone has just received a letter, signed by more than 300 actors, addressed to the SAG-AFTRA Leadership. It sounds threatening, they’re not kidding around. Here’s a part of it:
We hope you’ve heard the message from us: This is an unprecedented inflection point in our industry, and what might be considered a good deal in any other years is simply not enough. We feel that our wages, our craft, our creative freedom, and the power of our union have all been undermined in the last decade. We need to reverse those trajectories.
The letter was signed by the likes of Meryl Streep, Jennifer Lawrence, Brendan Fraser, Rami Malek, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Ben Stiller, among others.
The key issues, according to Rolling Stone, include “minimum pay, residuals that consider the growth of streaming, healthcare, pensions, and regulation around how self-tapes are used in the casting process”
They now have just three days to agree on a deal, otherwise this will cause massive disruption in the industry, much more so than the current WGA strike. Expect a massive downturn in production. This strike will immediately halt all film productions.
This decade has been such a terrible one for movies. We already had the pandemic halting many productions and projects being shelved indefinitely. Now you have another potential strike, which could very well last for months.
A real shocker. There are some people you think will live forever, and Sir Patrick Stewart was one of them. The legendary actor has passed away at the age of 86. We’ve lost one of the greats.