The current contract for the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists expires at 11:59 pm PDT Friday. The actors could join 11,000 members of the Writers Guild of America, who have already been on strike for two months. Industry experts like Jonathan Handel, an entertainment lawyer and writer and author of a book on the 2007-08 writers strike, “Hollywood on Strike!: An Industry at War in the Internet Age,” expects that there will be a strike.
The Alliance of Motion Pictures and Television Producers , which is negotiating on behalf of the studios, includes Amazon\n \n , Apple\n \n , CBS\n \n , Disney\n \n , NBC Universal, Netflix\n \n , Paramount Global, Sony\n \n , and CNN parent company Warner Bros. Discovery. Many of those companies have seen drops in their stock price in the last year, prompting deep cost cutting, including layoffs. Earlier in the week it seemed as if an actors strike could be avoided.