I have friends out on the picket line. I’m sure most of us do; it’s not unlikely that at least one or two of you are out there. For those of us doing associated work, it’s a delicate balancing act. We want to support the strikers. But what is our obligation toward them? How do we continue to do our work while supporting their right to be paid properly for theirs? And to be perfectly honest, some of the guidelines being sent out aren’t exactly helpful—I’m still not sure if I count as an influencer, though some of the people I follow on YouTube definitely feel they fall under that description.
It is true that very little of the work I do, by its very nature, is for any specific work, and most of what I do is about work that’s years and more likely decades old. My parenting schedule and low income have prevented me from joining the Barbenheimer phenomenon. And frankly, a lot of what I write about is not making new money for the studios in any case, as I’m either finding it through illicit means—frequently YouTube—or I’ve owned it on DVD for years. And while DVD residuals are nowhere near as high as they ought to be, it frankly wouldn’t surprise me to learn that one of the reasons things aren’t getting physical media releases is that it would mean residuals.
We are advised to keep watching, because it reminds the studios that demand continues. What will they do with high demand if there is no new supply? That this weekend saw an enormous number of people actually going to the theatre may have applied pressure on the studios that they weren’t expecting—let’s be real, a lot of internet media phenomena have faded. (Remember, we were all busy that weekend and they should absolutely release Morbius a third time!) That people genuinely did want to go see those movies, and specifically both of them as a double feature, may have taken the studios by surprise.
When I write about the Disney strike, there’s always a certain amount of “yeah, but the studio was skirting bankruptcy” involved. Walt could’ve handled the whole thing better, goodness knows, and the animators’ demands were fully reasonable, but at the same time, only government contracts saved the studio through World War II. We don’t have that here. Warners is having some kind of weird fire sale at the moment, but if they were handled better could be in a much better position. (No, why would we want a new Brendan Fraser movie when we could have one with someone who should be in prison?) The streaming services are paying their employees starvation wages.
It’s currently agreed that one of the biggest problems right now is that the streamers are listening to the tech people. Not their own, but the scammy pro-crypto, NFT-owning kind. There are ways to handle streaming that make sense, and it includes things like “don’t cancel shows with obsessive fandom” and “actually promote your original content.” That’s not what we’re getting here. And you can’t just not pay your actors in order to make money; without actors and writers, what do you have to sell?
If you have a few spare bucks after supporting the unions, consider supporting my Patreon or Ko-fi as well!
