Hollywood’s Big New Labor Deal: Studios To Offer Guilds’ Health Plans $100M Lifeline In Exchange For Longer Multi-Year Contracts In 2026
EXCLUSIVE: SAG-AFTRA is already lined up to be the first Hollywood guild to kick off 2026 contract negotiations with the studios and streamers, and both sides have some big asks of the other.
Among them, Deadline has learned, the now Greg Hessinger-led Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers is preparing to offer the actor’s union, the Christoper Nolan-run DGA and the WGA a massive injection of cash to get their respective Health Plan in tip-top shape. In response, the studios and streamers want the guilds to agree to shift their contract lengths from the current three-year span to more like five years.
Nothing has been officially put in writing, and SAG-AFTRA isn’t even scheduled to sit down with ex-SAG boss Hessinger and his Sherman Oaks Galleria gang until early February. However, as mandarin Ken Ziffren noted back in October when the attorney said that “insiders know one of the three guilds has only a six-month reserve,” the AMPTP has pretty much lined up the studios and streamers (and whoever owns or does not own Warner Bros Discovery that week) with a figure to put on the table.
The AMPTP is prepared to offer the WGA, the now Sean Astin-led SAG-AFTRA and the DGA (who has the healthiest Health Plan of the three) around $110 million to get their respective “Cadillac” plans, as Ziffren termed them, in the black.
The plans are “running huge deficits on a month-by-month basis,” a well-versed studio and streamer source tells us. “It’s not sustainable; it has to be addressed.”
(L_R) Ted Sarandos, then SAG-AFTRA president Fran Drescher and SAG-AFTRA National Executive Director Duncan Crabtree-Ireland at the SAG Awards in February
Gilbert Flores
Of course, nothing comes without a price or a cost, especially in what is looking increasingly like Ted Sarandos’ town — especially after the leadership role the Netflix co-CEO took in reaching a deal in 2023 to end the writers’ and actors’ strikes. There is talk that the AMPTP will ask the guilds in their negotiations next year to consider trimming their health plans both in terms of services and perhaps even eligibility.
When it comes to a longer overall contract, the key term is stability, we hear.
Citing that need in an ever-changing industry kneecapped in recent years by one crisis after another may be a bit of a stretch with more than a few of the instabilities — production declines among them — being of the C-suites’ own making. Still, the AMPTP’s post-pandemic, post-strikes and post-wildfires logic is that extending the overall contracts with the WGA, DGA and SAG-AFTRA will allow those same C-suites to focus more on production, money and, well, making money, which the organization will argue is good for jobs in an era of layoffs and declining bi-coastal production.
To below-the-line workers, longer deals will offer the promise, in the AMPTP’s view, of greater job security in a less antagonistic labor environment.
Of course, to some that’s just another agreement not worth the paper it will be printed upon.
“Longer contracts mean less reasons for the studios and the AMPTP to pay attention to labor,” a top Writers’ Guild insider told Deadline today. “That’s less attention to AI, residuals and mergers, and that’s not a good place for us.”
The AMPTP did not respond to Deadline’s request for comment on the notion of longer contracts with the guilds or health plan funding. On the other side of the table, the WGA also did not respond. The DGA and SAG-AFTRA did get back to us but both declined comment.
Additionally, with David Zaslav and WBD locked in to sell their studio and streamer assets to Netflix for $83 billion despite a newly amended hostile takeover offer of $108 billion from David Ellison‘s Paramount for the whole company, all of the guilds have expressed displeasure with further consolidation. With AI and residuals certain to be on their agenda along with those heavily subscribed health plans, the WGA and others have been lining up their bargaining committees ahead of next year’s negotiations.
Just like in those picket-line filled days of 2023, Ellen Stutzman will once again be leading the writers, the WGA said last month.
Under the current labor agreements, the WGA’s deal expires May 1, 2026, while the SAG-AFTRA and DGA deals are up June 30. Word is that no one expects those dates not to be met with new deals well before those respective deadlines.
