As Hollywood writers vote to strike, how will this impact Canadian productions?

A potential strike among Hollywood writers could have an impact on Canadian productions, according to one expert.

Last week, the Writers Guild of America (WGA) announced its members had voted 98 per cent in favour of going on strike when their contract expires on May 1 amid negotiations with the Alliance of Motion Pictures and Television Producers (AMPTP).

Negotiations have been underway for a new three-year collective agreement between WGA, which represents more than 11,000 screenwriters, and AMPTP since the end of March. The union is pushing for better health and pension plans, standardized compensation across materials released in theatres and on streaming platforms, as well as regulation of the use of artificial intelligence to create material for film and TV.

The strike could provide an opportunity for Canadian productions to be acquired by American broadcasters and produced for American TV, film critic Rad Simonpillai told CTV’s Your Morning on Monday.

“It opened the door, so now Canadian productions are more regularly getting produced for American TV,” Simonpillai said. “But how much of a benefit [this is for Canadian productions] is yet to be seen because we’re already producing so much for the U.S.”

When writers in Hollywood went on strike in 2007, Canadian production Flashpoint was among those bought up by CBS and other American broadcasters.

The latest strike, if it goes ahead on May 1, would be the first WGA strike in 15 years.

“[The strike] is caused by built-up tension from the way pay structures were changed when the streamers came about,” film critic Rad Simonpillai said.

“In the old days, when a writer wrote a TV show or movie it [would] play in multiple different formats, like on TV or in theatres, and [writers would] get residuals over the years,” Simonpillai said. “But because streaming companies often don’t reveal how many streams their content gets, companies like Netflix or Apple pay large lump sums to writers in exchange for owning the lifetime rights and residuals to that content.”

“So when you hear about how Netflix paid $450 million for two 'Knives Out' movies, or when Apple pays $25 million over quota, that's because they're buying the lifetime rights,” he added.

Simonpillai claims these decreased residuals have a negative impact on writers’ health-care benefits when, in the past, their residuals would pay into their yearly health-care premiums.

Writers' rooms have also shrunk, Simonpillai said, creating “mini-rooms,” where studios hire fewer writers and pay them less to hash out the details of a show before an official writers’ room writes the scripts.

“They’re relying on them to do more and more work for less money. All of this basically accumulates to the fact that writers are making way less than they used to, even though there's so much more content,” Simonpillai said.

The Directors Guild of America and the Actors Guild of America also have upcoming contract negotiations, and Simonpillai said these unions may vote to strike too if WGA doesn’t come to an equitable agreement with AMPTP.

Simonpillai said he expects the first shows to be impacted by a strike are talk shows and daytime soap operas. Hollywood productions and big TV shows have banked scripts that have already been written, “so they’ll be able to hack it for a while…but eventually you might see Hollywood start changing their schedule around, like maybe some of our year-end 2023 stuff will have to get moved to 2024.”