However, this isn’t the first time that writers have taken strike action in Hollywood. It’s been 15 years since the last strike occurred – a WGA strike loomed in 2017 but a deal was reached in the 11th hour, which averted any industrial action.
The last WGA strike lasted 100 days , with writers fighting over better royalty pay from DVD sales and union protection. It impacted many popular shows at the time, from cutting episodes in shows likeDuring the strike action in 2007 and 2008, reality TV exploded as a way to substitute the lack of content. Without the need for Writers' Guild members, talk shows and game shows were an easy and cheap way to plug the gaps.
To get a sense of the scale of these changes, we’ll need to go back to the early days of 2020 when the pandemic was beginning to take hold. Tech companies like Netflix, Apple and Amazon had experienced a decade of unrelenting growth and were about to see their bottom lines begin to expand even faster. The pandemic was a golden age for streaming platforms, with many of us enjoying tons of ad-free content as companies poured outsized profits into expanding their original content libraries.
The surge in popularity of streaming platforms in that era prompted many networks and studios to launch services of their own to rival the industry stalwarts like Netflix, Apple, Amazon and Disney. Warner Bros. unveiled HBO Max and NBCUniversal debuted Peacock in 2020. The Board of Directors of the @WGAwest and the Council of the @WGAeast, acting upon the authority granted to them by their memberships, have voted unanimously to call a strike, effective 12:01 AM, Tuesday, May 2.Fast forward to 2023 and that period of cheap content has come to an end in the face of a global slowdown.