SAG-AFTRA is headed back to the bargaining table with the studios and streamers later this month.
The actors union issued a statement on Monday confirmed that negotiations with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers would resume on April 27. As with the first few weeks of talks, the two sides will be operating under a media blackout.
Talks between SAG-AFTRA and the AMPTP began in February. They paused just over a month later to make way for the WGA, which unexpectedly reached its own tentative deal with the studios over the weekend. While SAG-AFTRA had been expected to return to the bargaining table in June. Now that the writers have finished early and the DGA isn’t scheduled to begin talks until May 11, there’s time to pick things up sooner.
It will be interesting to see whether SAG-AFTRA can make a deal before the Christopher Nolan-led DGA takes its turn at the table. Both current contracts expire June 30.
Over the weekend, the writers guild agreed to a one-year extension to the contract that, if ratified, would make the deal run four years. As we previously reported, the contract extensions were a core tenet of the AMPTP’s strategy heading into negotiations with the above-the-line unions.
The studios and streamers planned to offer a cash infusion into the unions’ struggling health funds in exchange for a longer deal. While the writers were the worst off, the SAG-AFTRA and DGA funds have also been operating in a deficit.
Still, we hear that the AMPTP and SAG-AFTRA are at a bit of an impasse on that matter. According to our sources, SAG-AFTRA chief negotiator Duncan Crabtree-Ireland made it clear that some airtight AI protections would be necessary to get the union to agree to a longer deal, and the two sides were unable to find a middle ground before the clock ran out.
While new SAG-AFTRA President Sean Astin ran on a campaign to continuing to address several of the core issues that emerged from the 2023 strikes, including AI protections, he largely declined to acknowledge any specific priorities in a conversation with Deadline ahead of his guild’s discussions with the AMPTP.
“Hopefully we’ll be able to just conduct the negotiation consistent with the needs of the industry,” he said at the time.
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