$5 billion delays and cancellations: How much WGA and SAG strikes have cost Hollywood

Hollywood executives have reached a tentative deal with the writers who are striking. The strike has cost the entertainment industry billions of dollars and led to a monthslong delay in the filming and release of many television shows and movies.

Details of the three-year deal have not been released, and the deal will not be official until the final wording of the deal is reviewed by the Writers Guild of America, which represents the strikers. But estimates expect the strike to have cost the industry at least $5 billion so far.

WRITER’S GUILD OF AMERICA REACHES ‘TENTATIVE AGREEMENT WITH STUDIOS TO END STRIKE

“We stuck it out,” WGA liaison Caroline Renard told Reuters on Sunday. “This is a union industry, and it’s about the people that make the actual product that makes these company billions of dollars.”

Before the deal can be official, the negotiators will vote on whether to recommend the deal to leadership when it has final wording, which will then decide if they will present the deal to members for a vote. The actors with the Screen Actors Guild and American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (known collectively as SAG-AFTRA) are also still on strike.

The stoppages have affected not just the studios and union workers such as cameramen, production assistants, and other crew members but also caterers, costume suppliers, florists, and other secondary smaller businesses that support the industry.

Kevin Klowden, chief global strategist at the Milken Institute who projected the $5 billion cost, said the biggest factor in his projection was lost wages. However, Klowden said the delay in production of blockbuster films, like the sequel to Dune, and the cancellation of other shows would also contribute to significant losses.

“Hollywood’s been very heavily concentrated in terms of production activity, so anybody who does film and TV — Disney is a classic example of that — along with Warner Bros., Universal, and even at this point Netflix, Amazon, and Apple, they’re all getting affected,” Klowden told Yahoo Finance last month. “But we don’t see it as much on their bottom line as we do on the workers.”

Warner Bros. has projected the strike to cost the studio approximately $500 million.

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The writer’s strike is the second largest industry strike in history and has surpassed the monumental 100-day writer’s strike of 2007-2008. The 2007-2008 strike cost the industry roughly $2.1 billion. The current strike has lasted 146 days.

The 2023 writers strike began in May, and actors followed suit in July. Writers are pushing for higher residual payments for streaming services and limits on AI’s role in the creative process. The WGA union has called the proposed deal “exceptional” and said it included “meaningful gains and protections for writers.”