I have an awful lot of e-mails asking me how long I think the current Writers Guild strike will last and whether I think the directors and/or the actors will join us on the pavement and if so, what will that mean. Here is the absolute best, most accurate answer I can give you…
I don't know and neither does anyone else.
You can browse Ye Olde Internet these days and find umpteen jillion predictions, some fairly dripping with wizened certainty. A couple of them may be right but if so, they're right the way randomly-selected lottery numbers are sometimes right. No one knows.
We're in uncharted territory, people. To have a smidgen of an inkling, you'd probably have to have the offices of the AMPTP bugged. At best though, all that might tell you is which aspect of the current labor situation they're focusing on at the moment and which internal disputes between which member corporations are preventing them from agreeing on the next offer…to some union. It might be to the costume designers and it might be about Velcro® for all we know.
I am reminded, as I've often been in the past on this blog, of a great quotation from the late news guy, Jack Germond. He once said, "The trouble with the press is that we aren't paid to say 'I don't know' even when we don't know." Most people don't click on headlines that say that. A lot of them think any answer is better than no answer even if it's wrong. So a lot of sites are posting any answer.
This is my fifth Writers Guild strike. There are only so many lessons to be learned from my first four. All involved a different AMPTP with different member companies who marketed their product in different ways, bartering with a very different Writers Guild. Some of the issues are familiar but many involve marketplaces that didn't exist at the time of previous negotiations…and some of them aren't mature, fully-developed business models, meaning that no one is sure exactly where the money will be in them.
Past strikes were about contracts covering cable channels before anyone knew how new channels like HBO or Showtime would evolve. Or they were about the financial structure of the videocassette biz back in the days of the Betamax. Everyone thinks there's a tremendous future in A.I. but no one's sure where that's headed. And don't even think of asking a chatbot to write out a solution.
In spite of the above, I'm optimistic it will all get settled and the strike(s) will end. One thing that's certain is that the studios need product and they can only exist so long on reruns and reality shows. It will all get worked out.
I'm just not putting any stock in anyone's predictions about how and when.