“The company now expects to exceed $1.7 billion in free cash flow for the third quarter of 2023, in part due to the strong performance of ‘Barbie’ as well as incremental impact from strike-related factors,” the entertainment giant says in a regulatory filing.
What these articles never talk about is the demands that actors and writers are making, and how paltry that pay raise would be in comparison to these losses.
The studios are being pennywise and pound-foolish, and pissing off the most valuable part of their industry, the talent.
how paltry that pay raise would be in comparison to these losses.
It’s just the people who are striking aren’t just asking for a meager raise now.
There’s also stuff about stopping AI before that Black Mirror episode about AI pumping out completed shows come true.
The studios don’t want to agree to stopping that, because they want it to happen.
Which means the strikers are right, and should be striking.
pissing off the most valuable part of their industry, the talent.
A decade or two from now, it might be AI writers, AI actors, and making a whole movie happens on a computer that just spits out a finished product.
That is something studios would be willing to take a half a billion hit against. And if they didn’t think it was coming, they would have caved by now.
The workers only have leverage if they strike before they can be replaced, and demand a future where humans are more involved than typing in a couple prompts.
Less than a decade, I think. We won’t live to see the first completely generated movie star. We’ll live to see them become the default. We’ll live to see a time when live human acting is, in and of itself, a noteworthy occurrence.
AI isn’t even driving this forward. Square has been ringing this bell for more than a decade with its movies. AI is just making it cheap. And that fact alone is why it will continue, unabated and unhindered, come what may.
What the studios aren’t realizing is that it’s not just the end for human actors, it’s their end as well. If you can generate feature length films with effects and acting and sound, who the hell needs a major studio?
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“All past performances are not eligible to be part of training data. Talent will have the option to allow their performance/work to be added to a training data set no less than N years after the first public release”
And how can that ever be truly ensured/compliance confirmed?
Studios can pinky swear then somehow, oops, some third party that they totally didn’t know about their practices uses the off limits material to generate AI results which are then sold to the studio.
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I bet doubling the pay for everyone striking would cost a lot less than 300-500M a year.
It would. But that would set the precedent that unions have any power and studios didn’t have all of the power. Studios aren’t willing to cave because they’re afraid they can’t completely control their workers and siphon as many profits as possible.
So the owners would rather take a 500m loss than settle. Fuck them.
Daddy does not negotiate with slaves!
I think part of the problem here is the news media and how the stories are framed.
The headline should be that obstinate companies refuse to share the profits and meet reasonable union demands, which will cost them millions.
Shows you whose side most of these news outlets are on. Once you see it, you can’t unsee the rampant, egregious anti labor bias in the news, or actually anywhere. Many people in the US have been effectively trained to hate unions and those striking. It’s just mind blowing to see how many people’s knee jerk reaction is siding against strikers.
These companies own the news media outlets.
Can’t rely on fake news on provide quality information. They are just daddy’s lap dogs shilling to us.
Workers must get educated, learn to read between the lines and act tin their own self interest and the working class… Anything less than that, slaves aint even trying to play the game.
Capital owners only speak language of profit so that’s how worker must speak to these lEAdErS.
Good. That’s the point, ya greedy shitheads.
Seriously, all the actors, writers, fx guys, directors, and so on should just form an employee owned studio at this point. Out of spite, if nothing else.
A lot of people worked very hard on the movie to make it happen, and it did well because it’s a good movie made by good people, and it’s wrong for WB to take the full credit for that. So, give the people what they deserve for their hard work, and the strike ends. Simple as that.
But, I’m realistic, and at this point it’s clear that WB doesn’t feel pressured enough to listen to reason yet. So, help us make them listen to reason, and keep supporting the strike in any way you can.
I went and saw Barbie twice. I caught the show when my fiancée was out of town, then took her out to see it when she got back. The movie works on a lot of levels and I thought it was well done. Great writing, great cast.
Why is the world topsy turvy? And why do we allow it?
Humans are good at compartmentalizing. The same father that shouts at a ref over a bad call in a tee ball game will happily support industries that will give his child cancer as long as he doesn’t have to think too hard about it.
Profit is amoral. If we want a fair and just society, we must ignore profit motives and accept the cost of being civilized. The capitalist will demonize unions and taxes and regulation, because those things cost the capitalist profit. And the capitalist is right, those things are the enemy.
Unfortunately, the capitalist has also convinced everyone else that we’re supposed to be on his side. The capitalist is not on our side.
Listen to meatbridge friends. Don’t turn away from the truth.
there’s an old saying : “buy real estate when there’s blood on the street”. consider this for a while.
But what happens when banks won’t underwrite property insurance because of climate disasters?
Complaining about nothing. Amazing.
Really updating us on progress report!
More work to be done here tho
ohh no! not enough!
With new covid coming, this couldn’t have happened at a better time. These fucks would never try home streaming again for their movies.
Oh no they lost 25% of their income. How horrible. Im gonna cry while buying some barbie movie merch.
“Only” 1.7 billion for 3 months…
Maybe y’all (Warner Bros) should do something about it.
Me having stock from before the merge: I’m Never Gonna Financially Recover from This
Really? I thought Zaslav was all about getting rid of scripted programming to save money. I would think this would be his dream come true.
