May 2 – immediately the next day after the international holiday of solidarity of workers – Writers Guild of America declared a mass strike. Authors with posters centrally took to the streets with posters of certain templates and in fact blocked the shooting of many popular projects that were still being worked on.
The reason for the largest demarche in the last 15 years is low, as it seems to them, salaries, loss of rights and the threat of neural networks. The union tried to negotiate with the biggest players in the market (Netflix, Amazon, The Walt Disney, Paramount and Apple TV), but in the end Warner Bros. admitted that the parties did not come to any compromise. Therefore, the strike hit the entire industry.
Brothers Matt and Ross Duffer, the creators of Stranger Things, publicly howled. The directors wrote on social networks that they cannot start work on the completion of the project (season five) while the protests are going on: “work on the script does not stop when filming begins.”
Photo: GLOBAL LOOK PRESS
“We would love to start production with our amazing cast and crew, but this is not possible during this strike,” the Duffers wrote. “Hopefully a fair resolution will be found soon and we can all get back to work. Until then, everything is on hold.
The seemingly revived Blade project also froze. The new part of the vampire saga, almost 20 years after the release of the third part, decided to restart Marvel Studios. It was planned that the shooting of the next film about the adventures of the evil spirit hunter should begin in June of this year, that is, at the moment the work on the script was in full swing. True Detective and Green Book star Mahershala Ali was supposed to play the lead role. The premiere of the film was scheduled for September 6, 2024. But now it is not clear how long the strike will delay the start of the project.
Experts note that the strikers’ demands (monetary privileges, permanent employment of series authors, a ban on the use of artificial intelligence in script development, and much more) are still perceived by the Alliance of Film and Television Producers as absolutely impossible.
The last such strike happened in 2007, when some 12,000 screenwriters abandoned their laptops, and the industry suffered more than three billion dollars in losses.
