The strike, now in its third month, is over a new contract with studios for more money when their work is sold on DVD – they want a rise from 5 to 8 cents for every $19 DVD sold – and downloaded from the Internet – they earn nothing at the moment and they’re asking for 2.5%. At the moment only David Letterman’s independent production company, Worldwide Trousers, and Tom Cruise’s Untied Artists have signed deals with the writers but the major studios, always keen to hold onto their money, are not budging from their spot, even thought they could lose up to $7billion in revenue.
Even if the dispute is solved in the next few months, the actors’ and directors’ guilds are planning to strike when their contracts with the studios finish in June, so at the moment, and unless a miracle takes place, we could all be stuck watching endless re-runs of Friends (a bit like Channel 4 but ALL THE TIME) without even any good movies to geek out over. If the Oscars end up being cancelled and, like the Golden Globes, turned into an hour-long press conference then we’ll know that we need to raid the classic sections of DVD stores for something decent to watch.
