State of the Film Union 2024
Strikes and Politics and Streaming took over the film landscape last year, where solidarity came and went and Netflix was the big winner.
Another year and another State of the Union. The film world experienced many unique events to create one of the more exciting years, unless you were a below-the-line, minimum-wage worker who couldn’t work for half a year. Barbenheimer cracked the theatrical release code while superhero films, most notably at Disney and Warner Bros., finally saw decreases across the board; politics, in the form of industry-level unions/guilds as well as external world events, took control of the narrative; and Netflix won the Streaming Wars. While it’s too early to tell how these events will affect the non-near future, they’re showing signs towards significant industry realignment.
STRIKE!—Building Solidarity
“The strength of the working class is organization. Without organization of the masses, the proletarian is nothing. Organized it is everything. Being organized means unity of action, unity of practical activity.” This quote from Lenin opens Sergei Eisenstein’s first feature film, Strike, which could also apply to the long-undiscovered potential of the film industry’s guilds and unions. This solidarity formulated but failed to reach its full potential during the 2007-8 WGA strike, but with Covid and streaming disruptions, IATSE (behind the scenes workers in crafts ranging from motion picture animator to theater usher) successfully negotiated an expansion of workers’ rights in 2021 while creating a unified front for the future.
Unity was realized during the WGA (2 May – 27 Sep.) and SAG (14 July – 9 Nov.) strikes, when IATSE, also unable to work, joined the picket lines alongside the writers and actors. This level of cross-guild co-operation was unseen in the American film industry up to this point (and we’ll see if writers and actors show up to potential IATSE strikes in the coming months as they’re 2021 contracts are up for renewal) because media company CEOs didn’t see why they should have to pay a living wage to their employees.
For the WGA and SAG, residuals, minimum earnings from streaming services, and AI regulation were the main hurdles. These two groups were uniquely suffering from these changing production methods in the streaming era, mostly with TV shows, where spending on content increased but the number of episodes in a season decreased. Therefore, staff writers worked less, which gave the production companies an opportunity to slash pay, hours, and number of writers per show. But after an intense 146 days of picketing outside Netflix, Disney, Warner Bros., and others, writers received a guarantee on number of writers for shows, a minimum period of working weeks, an increase in payments (especially for shows without an established minimum salary), while actors and performers, who striked for 118 days, received their largest wage increase in four decades. Other less concrete yet promising starts are the demands for transparency with streaming data, in which residuals and bonuses focused more on viewer numbers and hours.
The studios, who dragged their knuckles as long as possible until it appeared they needed to reach a deal in the Fall to kickstart production in the Winter, front-loaded their films/shows in the first half of the year because they expected workers to stop accepting shitty working conditions—one doesn’t need to be smart to run these content palaces and make tens of millions USD. Theatrical releases increased (92-130) compared with 2022 while streaming releases decreased (507-490). The increase was mainly with sub-ten million USD budgeted films, which increased by 110%, and blockbusters (over-hundred million USD), which increased by 86%. TV comedies took the biggest L, with the number of premieres decreasing 30% and drama premieres decreased 25%. True crime premieres increased by 8% on broadcast/cable but decreased 11% on streamers.
Theatrical releases successfully continued to come out of its lockdown hibernation but will probably have problems with 2024 releases and TV took the real hit this year, which may even continue this year. Also, two worrying trends were propelled: decrease in mid-budget theatrical releases and scripted TV shows.
On the statewide economic level, the fallout from the strikes led to a six billion USD loss. (David Zaslav, Warner Bros. Discovery CEO, will be announcing his massive 2023 earnings increase soon, which was tied to free cash flow rather than performance, meaning the lack of spending on productions from the strikes were a great short-term benefit for his bank account while his employees earned nothing.) Without the ability to write scripts in the Summer and early Fall, and no actors able to perform until November, production levels from October to December in Los Angeles were down 36.4% compared to last year, which is not the direction to go after recovering from covid production stoppage. In all, TV production levels were down 54.3% compared to 2022 and film shoots even farther at 57.5%. And far from being a Hollywood problem, the British Film Institute revealed that spending on content in 2023 dropped 35% directly because of the strikes.
Although these numbers are grim and don’t even begin to describe the hardships that over a hundred thousand workers faced, the strikes provided them with a previously unseen collective force that received industry-changing contracts that acknowledged the changing landscape from streaming and other disruptions.
Barbenheimer Slays the Superheroes
Whereas the death of the superhero film has been a yearly yell for a decade or more, it seems they’ve considerably, finally, dropped off across the board. Marvel and DC both had substantial duds compared to their 2019 highs, which is due to their transitionary—post-Thanos and post-Snyder—status. While those IPs are quickly drying up, other Disney and WBD properties have remained steady on average. Barbie and The Super Mario Bros. Movie were the biggest winners of the year and the only two films to reach a billion USD worldwide, though Oppenheimer could easily hit that after a theatrical re-release. They’re also notably the first two highest grossers in a long time (I’m not interested in taking several minutes of light research to figure out the exact year) that are not straight remakes or sequels, just normal corporate advertisements. Not bad!
The other top grossing IP winners were Guardian of the Galaxy Vol. 3, Fast X, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, The Little Mermaid, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part 1 (Paramount officially dropped the “part 1” from the title but idgaf), and Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania—notice all the creatives ways they avoided giving them a simple numbered sequel title. Even with the relative decline in superhero films, audiences are still showing up to IP projects, with Oppenheimer and Elemental being the only non-IPs (if you don’t count adapted bio-pics and Pixar films) of the top nineteen grossers of the year. Prefab marketing campaigns will always help an industry in decline.
About bio-pics, which are fairly numerous, the very recent trend in corporate bio-pics suddenly peaked. These film are now part of the lucrative sub-sub-genre of The Social Network rip-off cinema. It’s somehow important for cinemagoers to understand that the Tetris game helped expose and bring down the mighty USSR or how a janitor added hot peppers to Cheetos. While there were still the usual films about historical figures like Bonaparte and Priscilla P, the shift towards corporate bio-pics signal a strange form of post-capitalist cinema, for lack of a better term, that, adjacently to superhero movies, can run easily recognizable marketing campaigns for known products.
I don’t think these films could last long in their current form—unless they start multi-versing Cheetos and Tetris. They will most likely be consolidated into branches like Mattel pics, Barbie being their Iron Man, which will be siloed within a media conglomerate. Toy companies and other multi-consumer product giants that own a list of recognizable product names will run the sub-sub-genre like mobs during Prohibition and help inch films closer towards their final destination as ‘content’. The regular old-school period-piece bio-pics continue their march because of a certain prestige (critical and awards-winning) value, but they seem to be moving increasingly towards streaming services that want the glamor and prestige without the pesky necessity of theatrical viewing and support for the creative arts. As Zizek would say, it’s just another form of content being emptied of its meaning, like coffee without caffeine and beer without alcohol: movies without meaning.
The Barbenheimer phenomenon, which I wrote about while it was happening, was the year’s sledgehammer, even with the stars unable to promote them for 95% of their runtimes. It’s especially glaring that these box office performances (Barbie: 1,445,638,421 USD and Oppenheimer: 957,700,200 USD) happened the same year that superhero films failed to reach a billion—they couldn’t beat a three-hour R-rated period-piece about nerdy physicists and mid-century political hearings. One should ask, did the pandemic create a superhero reset, as we’ve seen last year with Top Gun: Maverick usurping everything not named Avatar—also a year without a billion USD grossing superhero film? Are we finally at the inflection point where superhero films aren’t fashionable anymore? Are audiences hungry to see auteur-driven films, or was the Barbenheimer a unique, unrepealable sensation? I hope the answers are yes, yes, and yes/maybe.
Netflix Won the Streaming Wars (2019-23)
Netflix had two essential benefits that no other streamer could reach: a head-start massive subscriber count turning it into an essential content service, and the ability to hide their data because of their tech-company status. If the former had given way to a formidable enemy, like Disney+ or Max, then the latter would remain the same. But since they effectively won the streaming wars, they flexed their data proudly for the first time. What this says is ‘we’re so far ahead that productions putting together packages to pitch to different companies need not worry about the numbers.’ Also, it challenges the other streamers to release data, which everyone knows have considerably lower numbers. But how and why did this happen now?
More of a technicality and realization of reality, streamers went all in at the end of the last decade because Wall Street had determined that subscriber count gave Netflix an undeniable lead, which increased their stock value. With the decline in broadcast/cable TV viewing and accompanying lucrative ad/package deals, media conglomerates shifted to streaming by taking their content off Netflix and going into massive amounts of debt. After years of this, no streamer came close to eclipsing Netflix as an essential service or making a profit. This all started changing almost two years ago, when Wall Street then decided that profit rather than subscriber count was more important. While Netflix may have seen their first ever short-term slump in stock price and sub count, it more importantly set forth a long-term obstacle to the other streamers knowing a profit wouldn’t come soon.
In their latest earnings report, Netflix added thirteen million subscribers and earned over five billion USD in 2023, which increased their stock price more than 10%. Also, news broke that Netflix will be licensing big-title content from their biggest competitors, like Sex and the City and DC films. Disney CEO Bob Iger said in 2022 that licensing content to a competitor is like “selling nuclear weapons technology to a Third World country” and watching them fire it back at you. In the ultimate example of ‘if you can’t beat them join them’, Netflix’s “competitors” will again license their content to the world’s largest streaming service as an important form of exposure/marketing hoping to increase the amount of traffic to their own streamer. WBD licensed Dune: Part One to Netflix until the day before the sequel hit theaters; we’ll see where Dune: Part Two lands as it’s finishing its theatrical run.
Israel-Gaza: Undoing Solidarity
To end on an ongoing conflict, the Israeli assault on Palestinian civilians has done much to destroy the unity created from the strikes. While the SAG and DGA issued pro-Israeli statement the first week that Palestinians were being killed en masse, WGA didn’t issue anything. This led to a lot of internal discussions among WGA members who support Israel, which led to further badgering and bickering among former comrades in arms. They signed their own rogue public statement calling out the WGA leadership’s failure in condemning the October 7 attack and not properly representing the Jewish minority in the industry. A dueling open letter was then signed calling out the members calling out the WGA, which didn’t like how heavyweights, including Jerry Seinfeld, were supporting Israel’s “ongoing siege of Gaza.” Furthermore, they feared that “as storytellers, the narratives we craft matter, and the language we use has consequences. This is especially true in a moment where many of us who stand against genocide cannot even take that bare minimum position publicly without fear of being doxxed or blacklisted.” Not unreasonably, it’s easy to see who’s in danger when the USA is supporting Israel financially and diplomatically.
The WGA was the largest flashpoint because of their disunity only three weeks after reaching a historic deal made in solidarity. Other organizations and groups in the film world, not just domestically, have their open letters and signatures and whatever, but who faced real discrimination and consequences? The most high-profile incident was Maha Dakhil, who stepped down from her board position as co-head of Motion Pictures at CAA (Creative Arts Agency) after posting an IG story calling out others for supporting genocide. Still an agent at the agency, she received support from Tom Cruise, her client, who told CAA, in person at the offices with Dakhil, that he was backing her. Aaron Sorkin, a master in staging fictionalized drama, quit CAA over this, even though they had forced Dakhil out of her leadership position. A group of assistants threatened to walk out over how CAA dealt with Dakhil but didn’t.
In the ultra-competitive world of A-list talent management, it’s hard to tell if CAA genuinely disliked Dakhil’s post, whether it was bad PR for the agency, or a convenient way of pushing out a powerful agent repping Cruise, Portman, Hathaway, Witherspoon, Wilde (Olivia), and directors such as Steve McQueen, as well as backing minority-driven projects and stories. Although nothing concretely positive will come out of all these letters and signatures regarding the murder of Palestinian civilians, it’s the first time that Hollywood has shown collective resistance to Israel, which had regularly held rallies together in support of their wars since 1948.
Such is the state of the film union today: blanket diplomatic platitudes, dirty upper-management politics, an industry in constant financial threats according to metrics determined by Wall Street and C-suite earnings, corporate bio-pics empty of meaning, less film/TV production even after winning wage/benefits gains, but also an increase in ticket sales for auteur-led films, some remaining bits of solidarity as IATSE is entering negotiations, and less content siloing on streamers nobody uses.
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