WGA and Hollywood Studios Set Tentative Agreement on New Contract

The Writers Guild of America and the major Hollywood studios have set the broad outline of a new master film and TV contract, quieting concerns about labor strife adding to the industry’s struggle to relaunch production amid the turmoil of the pandemic.

Multiple sources said the three-year contract agreement was essentially settled in the wee hours of Wednesday after a marathon negotiating session between WGA members and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers. Representatives for the WGA and AMPTP could not immediately be reached for comment.

Sources said the WGA made significant gains on what was the biggest sticking point in the talks at the end, namely the issue of how long writers can be held off the market under exclusive option to a TV series when the show is out of production. The deal is also believed to raise the earnings threshold for writers working on short-order shows to be paid under a more advantageous per-episode formula.

Previously, writers who earned less than $280,000 per season from a show were eligible for the formula designed to make sure that they were still being paid at the guild’s minimum weekly rate — something that went awry for many writers as more shows began to have longer production cycles for a less than 22-episode orders. The new deal is believed to move that cap up to $325,000 per season.

The previous WGA contract set in 2017 expired at 12:01 a.m. PT Wednesday.

More to come