members were down nearly $185 million last year, a 10.5% decline from 2019 because of the pandemic and months of shuttered film and TV production, according to the guild’s latest annual financial report. Total reported earnings fell to $1.5712 billion last year, down from $1.756 billion the year before – the first earnings decline since 2014. Even so, the employment of guild members fell by only 6.6% – to 6,108 jobs last year, which was down from 6,541 jobs in 2019.
“To protect over-scale pay,” the guild said, “the WGA negotiated improvements to the span provision in the 2020 MBA, increasing the earnings threshold to qualify for span protection from $350,000 to $400,000 for writer-producers working on broadcast, pay or HBSVOD short-order series, or $375,000 for basic cable short-order series.
Domestic syndication residuals decreased 22.6% from 2019, but is the guild’s third largest market at $29.27 million. Network prime time had a significant increase of 23.6% over last year with $24.56 million in receipts, which the guild said “is no doubt attributed to more repeats due to the pandemic.” Home video residuals continued their precipitous decline, bringing in only $1.8 million, a decrease of 13.5% from last year and a 66.2% decrease over the last five years.
still overpaid tbh