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.
While the business has reckoned with more seismic deals in recent years, among them Disney-Fox and AT&T-Time Warner, this time the reality seems to be dawning that bigger is not always better. Streaming platforms swim in red ink and legacy media assets (mainly linear TV) are eroding. Yes, Zaslav has hinted at opportunities to be had, but WBD was not really considered a buyer given its oft-stated focus on reducing its enormous debt. It’s not clear how trying to swallow a company with hefty debt of its own solves any problems.
Before I say anything, I am against the merger. However as far as streaming goes, having a monopoly on content makes a streaming platform inherently better. WBD isn’t betting on being the most successful streaming platform, it’s betting on every other streaming platform that can’t compete with Zaslav buying everything.
The best tv and movie streaming platform in history, Netflix circa mid-2010s, had no monopoly on content whatsoever. All these studios trying to monopolize their content onto their own streaming services has only made streaming worse.
Absolutely. I wasn’t saying Netflix was at any point morally right, and the rise of the Netflix original was definitely part of the beginning of the end of paid legal streaming being a good experience for the viewer.
the only streamers were Netflix and Hulu? When anything you wanted to stream was on one or the other? Otherwise known as a duopoly. It’s like how the PC gaming marketplace was objectively at it’s best when Steam had a monopoly on selling games. Having everything in one place is better.
Streaming will get better, everything else will get worse as the monopolies get to full power again.
Netflix had a near monopoly on the streaming but not on the actual shows and movies. All the studios still owned their shows and movies and could unilaterally pull them off Netflix and make their own services, evidenced by the fact that that’s exactly what they did. Importantly, the monopoly was not vertically integrated. Similarly, Valve makes very few of the games available on Steam.
Streaming will not get better as the studios fully monopolize it. Not without at the very least and most liberal an enforced ban on vertical integration in visual media and on exclusive licensing agreements. That won’t happen under capitalism though, so the only real improvement will be in the resurgence of piracy.
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.
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.”
So we are heading toward three streaming channels, basically cbs, nbc, abc, but instead of OTA and free with ads, it will be 20/month each with ads. All the utter crap on cable nobody wanted to watch, (100 channels with nothing on) will instead be ready to stream on demand. Well done shitty end stage capitalism, well done.
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.
While I’m still burning that SNW introduced the first main cast person with disability and killed them off just to lean on the crutch of development-by-death-of-mentor for Uhura, I’m super happy that Bruce Horak is now being regularly cast in guest star and recurring television roles in Canada.
It’s a long way from a Star Trek stint being a career-limiting choice as it was viewed in the past.
The current head of the FTC is bringing the first anti-trust case in many years. She’s launched cases against Google, and Amazon so far, and is investigating Facebook. That gives me some hope.
Such a deal would likely attract less regulatory scrutiny than other potential mergers, with WBD lacking any domestic broadcast network, and with mostly synergistic businesses. The biggest source of friction would likely be combining the two legacy film and TV studios.
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