We’re they only asking for 47 million as a ONE TIME fee? If so, this seems silly, yes. Assuming it’s entirely about money and the workers don’t get any other extra rights.
However, if it’s an ongoing thing, or if the workers end up with better rights and contracts in perpetuity, this is worth a LOT more than a few million. They’ll spend anything they have to on this, and save money in the long run.
So the workers will start to leave and only come back if the individually agreed salary is higher. They will still lose that money or permanently lose the workers. But on top of that they’ll lose all the money from the strike.
It is in businesses own best interest to pay wages high enough, that their workers are happy to stay and do their best. You know the Henry Ford paying his workers enough to buy his cars thing.
No this is about money.
In 15 years there won’t be any live action “big budget” movies anymore, they will be generated using ai models and licensing the likeness of actors.
The fact that they are eating 500M right now means that they are confident in their models, hence my 15 year prediction.
I think I’d predict A.I. will replace the business side of the film industry long before it can handle writing a decent script, much less generate a whole coherent movie. But if the models are that amazing in 15 years, I can imagine a scenario where it lowers production costs to the point directors don’t need a studio anymore.
Like imagine A.I. models can’t make a whole film but a director and writer can use A.I. tools to provide prompts and the script text to generate the scenes and easily add CGI effects. If “Adobe Film Director” or whatever can handle that and only costs $1000/year, who needs producers and distribution and all that?
The problem with AI is, that it tends to go for the “average” or “middle ground” solution. Also if we start seeing more and more AI movies, the models would learn off other AI generated content and that will degenerate them. It is AI inbreeding.
These things are kind of fundamental to the way machine learning works, because at heart it is statistics.
So either they will generate new movies, that are just reskins of other movies with ever more boring plots. Or they will still need actual writers and actors. Now i know hollywood is doing a lot of the first already. But without actual creativity, bringing along new ideas and starting new franchises, eventually it will get boring even for the most diehard marvel fan.
We’ve been here before and it’s a bluff. The capabilities of AI and future AI are specious at best and untested at worst.
The root of this issue is the fact that we have publicly traded companies at all. WB can weather actions from other persons all it wants, but it can’t capitulate to workers because of their obligation to the shareholders. All this would be over in a heartbeat if shareholders got together and demanded WB seek a resolution.
That i find a weird way of the Americans. The company is supposed to deny workers proper compensation and liveable working conditions, so the shareholders make more money shortly, or not even that because of the loss incurred by strikes?
Now they are basically advertising to everyone: “please work somewhere else. dont work here. we are a shit employer and you will get fucked”
With that they’ll jeopardize their company over the next decade. We all saw with Twitter how fast a company can be run into the ground, when the workers are getting fucked over too much.
