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Writers Guild East Leader Says This 100-Day Strike Is Different: Studios More “Obstinate” Now
(www.hollywoodreporter.com)
this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2023
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My take is that the production companies are channeling their inner Joker; it's not about the money, it's about sending a message. They want to break the unions, and are probably getting donations from streaming giants and others who want to see unions take a big loss.
This strike is going to last until someone cries Uncle, and both sides are fired up. I hope I'm wrong, but I'm imagining this strike going down to whoever has the most resources.
Media companies have been hemorrhaging money like a patient bleeding out on the operating table ever since Covid and their ill-advised entry into streaming. They have more to lose. A couple of them have a nice infusion of cash following some summer movie blockbusters, but that will only give them a little more runway.
I don't know off-hand where things stand with the most recent quarterly earnings, but I recall, for instance, WB Discovery lost $200M per week in the final quarter of 2022.
I don't think the studios have any money.
Unfortunately, there’s increasing evidence that the streamers are saving cash and reducing net streaming losses by not producing new content, while not having to worry that their competitors are out producing them.
For AMPTP, this is a deus ex machina that gets its members out of the trap of dreadnaught-like extraordinarily expensive competition.
Eventually, they won’t be able to buy existing content to fill their schedules and subscribers may find other things to do without new content, but for the moment there are incentives for them to drag out the strike.
I saw somewhere someone explaining that the massive cash flow from the "old" way of paying for content, namely high cable TV costs people used to have to pay for their 3 channels they actually watched - in addition to all the commercials the pay-tv people also had to watch, was a steady and reliable stream of cash that made its way to the content producers.
But since the big bundle pay-tv model is dead there is a huge drop in cash flow to content producers and this is making a massive change in normal operations inevitable.
That may be what's happening now.
I believe we’ve seen the same analysis.
The old cable model made Comcast the arbiter of an ecosystem, with streamers competing against one another, the model fell apart. It’s interesting that smaller players like Paramount and others are collaborating in some markets (e.g., SkyShowtime).
well yeah because AI is a thing now. there's some rumours that Marvel's Secret Wars and the Gollum Videogame was written by AIs
Gonna need some citation on Secret Invasion. I think that's a bastardization of the fact that AI was used to create the intro graphics which is widely known and talked about, but not used with the scripts.
I think AI is leading to a digital witch hunt. It’s ripe for abuse and bad actors will certainly use it, but it’s not all bad either. People are getting too easily triggered any time they catch a hint that AI may be involved in some capacity.
Definitely not just "written by" but heavily used I'm sure. It's widly known that Rockstar's GTA Trilogy they relied on AI just to upscale everything for them and then just shoved it out.
Maybe someday we'll get to the point where AI is good enough to produce whole works without human need, but we're a ways off from that right now. Right now it's a great tool to help augment jobs, but should be fine tuned and combined by humans. Buuut studio execs breeze past those details and just start the layoffs.
i mean the bird plot from Gollum feels like something an AI would hallucinate.
I watched that movie '65' with Adam Driver and the whole time I was thinking this has to be a movie written by AI