“We want nothing more than to resolve this and get everyone back to work,” declared Netflix’s Ted Sarandos at the top of the streamer’s Q3 earnings video call Wednesday, exactly a week after talks with the actors guild ceased, for now. “That’s true for Netflix. That’s true for every member of the AMPTP,” the co-CEO added of his studio peers.
Amidst an uptick in subscribers beyond Wall Street expectations and a surging after-hours stock, a newly unveiled deal with Skydance Animation and Netflix’s move into live sports, Sarandos’ comments Wednesday come a couple of hours after the streamer released its third-quarter earnings results. Reminiscent of Steve Jobs’ famed reality distortion field, the streamer oddly referred to talks with SAG-AFTRA as “ongoing” in its report – even though the parties have not negotiated in over a week and there seem to be no significant back-channel conversations.
.A fact Sarandos acknowledged in his remarks today.
“We spent hours and hours with SAG-AFTRA over the last few weeks, and we were actually very optimistic that we were making progress,” the garrulous Sarandos went on to say Wednesday of the now stalled talks. “But then at the very end of our last session together, the guild presented this new demand …a subscriber levy unrelated to viewing or success, and this really broke our momentum unfortunately.”
Still never wanting to end on a down note, Sarandos ended with: “You should know we are incredibly and totally committed to ending this strike. You know, the industry, our communities, in the economy are all hurting. So, we need to get a deal done that respects all sides as soon as we possibly can.”
SAG-AFTRA has said before and since talks broke down on October 11, they are willing to meet with the studios and streamers anytime.
Back on the company’s last earnings call on July 19, which was just a few days after SAG-AFTRA joined the WGA on the picket lines, the streamer co-CEO brandished his credentials as the son of a union electrician. One of Hollywood’s most prodigious negotiators, Sarandos also said: “We’re super committed to getting to an agreement as soon as possible, one that’s equitable, and one that enables the industry, and everybody in it to move forward into the future.”
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Besides a short-lived and unsuccessful sit-down with the WGA in mid-August, it wouldn’t be until late September, as the scribes’ strike neared 150 days, that Sarandos, Warner Bros. Discovery’s David Zaslav, NBCUniversal’s Donna Langley and Disney’s Bob Iger participated in renewed talks with the guild. After five days of bargaining sessions and almost five months of the WGA beginning on the picket lines, the parties reached a tentative agreement on September 24.
Quickly afterwards, as Deadline exclusively revealed, SAG-AFTRA plus the CEO Gang of Four and the AMPTP set the restart of talks on October 2 – the same day the WGA ratification vote began. While WGA members overwhelmingly backed their deal on October 9, the latest negotiations between the actors guild and the studios collapsed on the evening of October 11.
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As had been the case in pre-strike talks and from the second the studio and labor brass came back to the table, the divisions between the parties on the guild’s revenue sharing proposal for successful streaming shows and films was too great.
The latest proposal from the guild would cost the companies less than 57¢ per subscriber annually, SAG-AFTRA said, noting this was a new starting point in negotiations not the end result. The studios and streamers claimed that SAG-AFTRA’s proposal was an “untenable economic burden” which would cost them more than $2.4 billion over the course of a new three-year contract or more than $800 million per year. The guild said the studios and streamers were talking about an old proposal and inflating the numbers.
Speaking at the Bloomberg Screentime conference early on October 12, Sarandos was far more detailed than Langley, who had been on the same stage just 14 hours before having come from the now postponed deliberations, about how things came to close among the parties.
“Last night, they introduced a levy on subscribers on top of [other] areas,” the Netflix boss told the media crowd of SAG-AFTRA’s latest update of their own revenue sharing proposal. “conversations are no longer moving us in a productive direction,” Sarandos appeared to sidestep the notion of negotiations and reiterated a lot of the talking points the AMPTP had put out the night before slamming SAG-AFTRA for essentially not taking what they had been offered.
Invoking their sister guild, SAG-AFTRA accused the CEO Gang of Four and the Carol Lombardini-led AMPTP of “bully tactics” and using “the same failed strategy they tried to inflict on the WGA” to hobble the deliberations.
Since last week, there has been no official talks between the two sides. Perhaps as importantly, there has been scant backchannel chats, I heard.
SAG-AFTRA’s latest strike will hit 100 days come October 21.
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