Welcome back to What I’m Hearing, a little shorter tonight (you’re welcome!) because I’ve been traveling…

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• The double-whammy strike scenario: SAG-AFTRA’s decision to seek a strike authorization from its members in advance of its June 7 studio negotiations was unusual—and, astonishingly for the usually fractious actors union, it was unanimous. President Fran Drescher issued a fiery statement and its staff, led by national executive director Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, is on board as well. They’re fired up over wages, residuals, and self-tape auditions (which I wrote about back in October). But A.I. is perhaps the most imminent threat and thus a more pressing concern to the actors than to the directors or even the writers. So even if the DGA closes a deal, it won’t likely resolve SAG-AFTRA’s issues. The last time the guilds negotiated something truly gigantic was 1960, when (after a 12-year fight) they cemented residuals for movies reused on TV—and got pension and health plans, too. How’d they do it? Overlapping strikes by the writers and actors. Yes, two strikes at once. It just might happen again. —Jonathan Handel
• Some guys can’t take a hint: Brett Ratner, the filmmaker who’s been credibly accused of sexual abuse by multiple women, is running again for the Academy’s board of governors. This is campaign No. 4 for Ratner. How many times does this dude have to get rejected before he realizes it’s not gonna happen?
• Nice work if you can get it (you can’t): With TV writers walking the picket lines in solicitation of longer job tenures, among other issues, it might be worth asking for the Ted Lasso Treatment. Some writers on the current season of the Apple TV+ hit got weekly checks for more than a year as star-co-creator Jason Sudeikis constantly scrapped sequences and asked for rewrites. At one point, executives at producer Warner Bros. Television said no more. But Apple, cautious of upsetting the process on its biggest hit, authorized the added writers fees and more than 9 months of production for 12 episodes of a comedy series. With some writers on-set and involved in shoots, all told, several made well over $1 million for the season.
• TV’s Berlanti bellwether: The end of Peak TV is impacting all showrunners, but Greg Berlanti might have been hit hardest. By my count, Berlanti has just 5 scripted shows either on or officially greenlit as of this week’s upfronts: All American (CW), You and Dead Boy Detectives (Netflix), Girls on the Bus (Max), and Found (NBC). An enviable number, but nowhere near the 20 shows he had only a couple years ago, fueled mostly by the recently eviscerated CW.
• Box office over/under: Yikes, Fast X is tracking to just $60 million domestic ($10 million less than F9, which opened in Covid-ravaged May 2021) on a budget of well over $300 million. I’ll take the over with the hope that Universal is low-balling.

Wishful trade announcements aren’t limited to Cannes, of course. I’m still waiting for that Jack Nicholson movie he was supposedly coming out of retirement to make—in 2017. But there’s an especially high number of Cannes Bullshit Barometer candidates so far this year—a John Travolta-Katherine Heigl rom-com, a Patricia Highsmith horror biopic, and yes, a weird Nic Cage action-thriller, this one where he would play an Australian surfer, presumably with an American accent and a fantastic hairpiece. I know, that’s the Cannes market, but it will never not be funny.

Maybe it was the fact that the whole premise of the upfront—buy our great Fall TV shows!—was kinda B.S., given the striking WGA writers outside the presentations have all but guaranteed the fall schedules will be exclusively reality, sports, and reruns. ABC didn’t even bother to include a single scripted show in its fall lineup. It was certainly amusing to hear the executives dance around the realities of the strike. Netflix co-C.E.O. Greg Peters, having scrapped the company’s first in-person upfront for a pre-taped hour, smiled as he said, “It’s not exactly as we originally planned it, but we live in a dynamic world.” Yes, a “dynamic” world wherein top media executives make hundreds of millions of dollars selling shows made by writers who don’t. Quite a dynamic!

And those executives who more directly addressed the elephant in the mini-room seemed to do so with metaphoric guns to their heads. “We are grateful for the contribution writers make to our company, and respect their right to demonstrate,” NBCUniversal TV and streaming chief Mark Lazarus said as if reading from the NBCU H.R. handbook. (The same one that his former boss, Jeff Shell, clearly never read.) For the most part, the top executives didn’t even bother to address this all-important crowd. Disney’s Bob Iger was in France. Warner Bros. Discovery C.E.O. David Zaslav made others, like his ad sales chief Jon Steinlauf and HBO’s Casey Bloys, do the awkward talking. Like Zaslav, Fox C.E.O. Lachlan Murdoch snubbed the upfront stage yet participated in a MoffettNathanson analyst event across town.

It was there that Murdoch dropped the Whopper of the Week, a Hall of Fame false equivalency when asked about his nearly $800 million defamation settlement with Dominion Voting Systems. He wondered aloud why CNN, like Fox, had not been sued for its recent town hall with a lie-spewing Donald Trump. “I haven’t seen a lawsuit yet,” Murdoch said. “Maybe there’s one coming, but I’m not gonna hold my breath.” Yeah… I can only imagine the collective wince among Fox lawyers, who undoubtedly know the difference between a news network that skeptically interviewed Trump and another that repeatedly allowed its hosts and guests to spew damaging lies about specific companies, Dominion and Smartmatic. I’m guessing Lachlan also knows the difference.

Elsewhere, it was still weird seeing Netflix executives slavishly suck up to the advertisers it used to shun. 2015 Ted Sarandos would have cringed at the sight of 2023 Sarandos suggesting from the stage that Netflix host “a 30 minute commercial” that “plays out over several days.” He even made a comparison to the decades-old “innovation” of putting ads before movies on VHS and DVD, something, if I recall, consumers absolutely hated. Peters and Sarandos seemed to have forgotten the relentless obsession with “delighting the customer” that Reed Hastings used to evangelize.

Netflix spent an hour basically talking about “The Netflix Effect,” meaning how many people watch and are influenced by Netflix—three times as many as the other streamers combined, Peters repeated twice—and mostly avoiding the fact that all but about 5 million of those people watch without ads. That will change, of course, and the 5 million is arguably a good number given the Netflix ad business has existed for about six months. But Netflix certainly loses the ad reach argument these days, as the below U.S. chart from Antenna shows starkly:

Turns out the WGA East V.P. Lisa Takeuchi Cullen meant that the California economy is losing that amount. Big difference! The guild apparently arrived at that figure by taking the Milken Institute’s $2.1 million loss figure from the 100-day strike of 2007-08 and adding inflation. OK, whatever, mistakes happen (the trades corrected themselves too). But the guild then put out another missive, dutifully parroted by the media, purporting that the entirety of its demands “would cost the industry collectively $429 million per year, approximately $343 million of which is attributable to eight of our largest employers.”

It’s certainly true that these companies have made billions of dollars off writer work, and paying the guild members what they demand would amount to a rounding error for some of these companies. But the profits are not necessarily derived in the manner that is purportedly evidenced by the guild. Again, whatever. It’s all propaganda, of course, designed by officials to rile up members and keep their resolve strong as the strike drags. I’d probably do the same thing, and I doubt studio negotiator Carol Lombardini and her coalition even looks at this stuff.

The truth, sadly, is that in the short term, the studios are prepared for this strike and will probably save some money during the first few months of a shutdown. The top executives have been helpful enough to remind us of that fact. “Now, obviously, we have been planning for that and we have many levers to pull and that will allow us to manage through a writers’ strike even for an extended duration,” Paramount’s Bob Bakish said earlier this month. Come September, I think we’ll see that statement does pass the Bullshit Barometer.

Got a question, comment, complaint, or a hot Cannes package? Email me at Matt@puck.news or call/text me at 310-804-3198.