Hollywood studios and the striking writers will meet for a third day on Friday after concluding “marathon” talks aimed at resolving the nearly 150-day deadlock.
The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers studio heads and the Writers Guild of America union are scheduled to resume negotiations, but the WGA union asked members to return to the picket lines in a message to its members late Thursday.
“The WGA and AMPTP met for bargaining today and will meet again tomorrow,” the guild wrote in a note sent to members late Thursday. “Your Negotiating Committee appreciates all the messages of solidarity and support we have received the last few days, and ask as many of you as possible to come out to the picket lines tomorrow.”
A person with knowledge of the situation told CNN that the writers and heads of the four major Hollywood studios haggled for more than 10 hours on Thursday without coming to an agreement.
The source, who asked to remain anonymous because they were not officially authorized to speak about the situation, claimed that although more progress was made during the two days of intense negotiations between the two parties on Thursday, a deal to end the historic Hollywood work stoppage has still not been signed.
The AMPTP studio executives, including David Zaslav of Warner Bros. Discovery, Bob Iger of Disney, Ted Sarandos of Netflix, and Donna Langley of NBCUniversal, resumed talks with the WGA on Wednesday. Following the meeting, the parties made a rare joint statement announcing they will resume their conversations the following day.
It may be a sign of improvement that the two parties, who occasionally chastised one another for comments made to the media, issued a single statement.
CNN’s parent company is Warner Bros. Discovery.
The WGA went on strike on May 2, and as of Thursday, the work stoppage had been in effect for 143 days, closing in on the 154-day strike that took place in 1988 as the longest in the union’s history. Even before SAG-AFTRA joined the WGA on strike on July 14, many productions had already stopped.
Better pay, residual payments from streaming services for their labor, and employment protections from the usage of artificial intelligence are just a few of the requests that both sides have.
