Basically Disney is keeping a lot of the same creatives behind the original Daredevil, but intend to use season 1 pay rates because they tacked, ‘Born Again’ on to the title.
Pretty gross penny pinching from one of the wealthiest media corporations in the world.
Yeah, look at any of the Disney channel series, they all change the name slightly to reset the season and avoid union required pay increases. One example: The Suite Life… which was split into 2-3 season series.
It is a complete reboot though isn’t it? The original show on Netflix isn’t part of the canon of this one? If so then I don’t really get their complaint.
A tonne of the same cast are returning. Bernthal is still the Punisher, D’Onofrio is still Kingpin… no, this is a calculated decision to pay the workers less.
Same actors != not a reboot. Iirc they’re going to have gal gadot as Wonder Woman again but are rebooting her character so the 2 previous movies are not canon, didn’t happen.
If they’re making a new series that has literally nothing to do with the previous one, zero connection to anything that happened in it, how is it not a reboot? Should they use different actors just to justify it being a reboot?
I am fully in agreement with you, although I can see why you and others didn’t take that from my initial comment. The calculated decision I referred to was Disney’s cynical claim that this is a reboot. They’re shafting workers, we can all see it.
Even if they wipe the continuity, which is still very unclear, is it really fair to call it a “complete reboot” when they’re using the same cast for the most prominent roles?
The article mentions that the SAG-AFTRA negotiators and leads have been kept in the brief by WGA.
So, it sounds as though the writers have been conscious of the precedents they’re setting and there shouldn’t be surprises when the negotiations move onto the actors.
The leadership approved it, as the rail strikes proved, this means nothing. I await the outcome of the rank and file (aka people that actually matter) weighing in.
$16,000 for the credited writer of a one hour episode of a ‘big budget series’ of $30 million or more seems incredibly low. Most writers get only one or two script credits out of a 10 episode season, and many EPs take shared credit with the junior writers in the room.
And the rates for streaming residuals seem to be based on domestic uptake in the first 3 months, ignoring ‘sleepers’ and shows that sell well globally. All to say, this doesn’t get around the ‘Suits’ problem.
Yes, the writers get a base pay for being in the room, but it’s still not a lot out of a major property.
Who can live in LA on a couple of script credits a year?
Always said to see new headlines pushing the narrative that the strikes over just because there's a proposal. Until the rank and file vote, calling it a tentative deal seems like an overstatement that only serves to build the narrative to attack the workers later when they don't accept it. Use headlines to oversell how good the deal is, act like it's over, and then blame the workers when they don't accept a mediocre deal.
But the leadership is put in place by the rank and file, with the assumption that they are negotiating on their behalf. If leadership accepts it is very likely everyone goes with it.
final approval is the safeguard against a bad deal. I also trust the rank and file to understand their own interests, there is also the possibility they’ve truly won a good deal. I’m mostly concerned with the lack of statements about AI concerns that were a part of the reason for the strike.
Under the terms of the agreement, “AI can’t write or rewrite literary material, and AI-generated material will not be considered source material” under the contract, meaning that AI-generated material can’t be used to undermine a writer’s credit or separated rights.
The summary notes: “A writer can choose to use AI when performing writing services, if the company consents and provided that the writer follows applicable company policies, but the company can’t require the writer to use AI software (e.g., ChatGPT) when performing writing services.”
The company also must disclose to the writer if any materials given to the writer have been generated by AI or incorporate AI-generated material, and the WGA says that it “reserves the right to assert that exploitation of writers’ material to train AI is prohibited by MBA or other law.”
Love to see success stories like this, hopefully this’ll kick things into motion for SAG-AFTRA’s success
One thing I noticed is no one from Paramount was mentioned to be at the negotiations starting on the 20th even though they’re in AMPTP, wonder why (then again a lot of other people in AMPTP wern’t there but they’re still pretty big so idk)
Starting on September 20, after a studio fumbled restart in August, Warner Bros Discovery’s David Zaslav, Netflix’s Ted Sarandos, NBCUniversal’s Donna Langley and Disney’s Bob Iger finally sat down directly with WGA chief negotiator Ellen Stutzman, as well as former guild presidents David Goodman and Chris Keyser and other members of the WGA Negotiating Committee in hopes of a breakthrough.
Yeah, Paramount’s CEO, Bob Bakish, seems to have largely sat the strikes out, only popping up in the news once or twice to say he wanted to see them resolved. It’s interesting.
He could resolve it tomorrow by accepting the union’s reasonable demands. He could have resolved it weeks ago by accepting the union’s reasonable demands.
That’s true, he could. But I’ve seen no evidence that he’s actively fighting the union’s demands unlike Iger, Zaslav, and Sarandos. I’d love to see evidence to the contrary if it exists, though.
That app is shockingly bad. I do not pretend it’s easy to make an app, or expect that everyone’s app should be as slick as Netflix’s. But for a service that’s coming up on a decade old, it’s astonishing that I can’t even use it half the time on the most popular TV brand.
The actors’ strike is unique in that compromising on AI kills the existence of their profession. Once their likeness and voice can be replicated by machines, they are all fired and have zero job prospects moving forward.
TPTB will churn out endless drivel at zero cost, pay actors nothing, and drown the world in more shallow, meaningless deepfake AI culture.
They didn’t go after the Arts first. They’re just able to go after them now. People in tech have watched their jobs get slowly eaten away by automation for over a decade now. And factory workers for longer than that.
drown the world in more shallow, meaningless deepfake AI culture
I find the imagery of a bunch of people entertaining themselves to death while non-sentient automated machines pump video into their eyeballs so deeply creepy that I’d like to assume it could never happen on a large scale, since a feeling of “connection” is kind of a big part of art consumption.
But part of me also knows that there will be a non-inconsequential part of society that wouldn’t have any problems with it.
I just wanted to point out how amazing it is that the Sistine Chapel was painted 541 years ago and is still emulated in art such as this thumbnail. That’s crazy!
So they think it’s better to get a tax write off of half the cost, and sell it to a streamer to cover the other half, than make money and profit with a global cinematic release?
Well, I’m not going to assume that every decision made by the senior decision-makers in a company is rational for the firm or for ‘maximizing shareholder wealth’ in the long term.
CEOs and executives may act in their own, or their firm’s short term interests, they can however also get complex decisions entirely wrong. Not to mention tax law can incentivize some sub rational behaviour.
There are enough historical cases of absolutely bad thinking running companies into the ground, with deceptive practices that leave lenders and subcontractors short.
The stock market’s reaction to act against bad management can be tardy.
(I’m setting aside corporations taking responsibility for larger societal benefits here because US SEC norms for publicly traded corporations don’t provide for that the way they are in Canadian or European law. In the other hand, there may be some arguments that some of these actions are anticompetitive, and worthy of antitrust investigation.)
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