About the WGA and SAG-AFTRA Strikes...

A rant I had on BlueSky

Here's the thing about Hollywood's payment system: it was working for everybody, and executives saw streaming as a way to fuck everyone else over and make it work exclusively for them. Because that's what executives do. And they convinced everyone to take a bad deal to "test out" the new system.

Then, they threw everything into streaming and, in doing so, eviscerated traditional revenue streams like reruns and home video, both of which had better deals for talent. And they were hoodwinked by tech bros who convinced them the path to profitability was MUCH shorter than it is.

Now those execs, who went all in on streaming SPECIFICALLY as a predatory scheme to take more money, are crying poverty because they say it's a losing proposition. And they want people to take a bad deal to underwrite their recovery from self-inflicted wounds.

But at this point, the talent have been living with the previous bad deal for so long a lot of people are being starved out of the industry. So they strike for a fair deal, and what do execs say? "We're going to starve them for this!" You complete fucking CHUDs, what did you think you did before?

Okay, sorry. Got a little off-track there.

Yeah, numbers for streaming are ROUGH. Just like basically every tech startup in the last 15 years, most streamers are nowhere near profitable and living on the largesse of VC money with the promise that if they decimate the market enough that they're the only option, they'll start to make money...but that's really hard for your employees to believe or sympathize with, when they have seen you dump hundreds of millions of dollars into it for a decade. Executives insist they're the smart ones. Why would they throw good money after bad for YEARS?

Meanwhile, stockholders and VC douchebros have been rewarding the gamble for years, living on promises of "we'll be profitable soon" and approving massive CEO pay packages to reward them for finding a way to pay the talent less.

This is all exacerbated by the long history of "Hollywood accounting." Long before the strikes were happening, Ed Solomon was tweeting about the HIGH-larious joke Sony has been playing on talent for years that insists they somehow lost money on 'Men in Black' and so don't owe any residuals.

So when you see companies pouring tons of money into a system, and executives being handsomely rewarded for that system, but you aren't getting paid? Well, it's hard to believe it isn't profitable. After all, these same companies have said for years theaters aren't profitable. VHS isn't. DVD isn't.

This history of obscuring the numbers so that those at the top can sneak away with an ever-growing slice of the pie is epitomized by streamers that refuse to give anyone ANY kind of clarity when it comes to their numbers. There's only one reason to hide that kind of data, and people know it.

I think this is the end of my rant for now. I just feel like one of the things reporters have not done well is communicating clearly what's going on, and why they should care about white collar workers striking. The answer for me is, they're striking against employers who are stealing them blind.