What an insightful year this has been for Disney; beyond lessons like remakes and reboots not being particularly lucrative after the box office letdowns of The Little Mermaid and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, a bit of light has also been shed on what happens when you call the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strike “irresponsible” whilst benefiting from a $20 million compensation package.
Spoiler alert: you get criticized and lambasted exactly as much as move like that deserves, as Disney CEO Bob Iger has come to learn since he made those very comments less than a week ago.
It’s a gross statement no matter how you swing it, but we can only imagine how the statement must look to the industry creatives who hardly make a living with their craft, one of which has elected to speak up against not only Iger’s sentiment, but that of the AMPTP as a whole.
In a recent interview with the New York Post, Alex O’Keefe, who served as a staff writer on hit FX television series The Bear and “lived below the poverty line” whilst doing so, didn’t hold back on the dire state of streaming residuals for writers, nor on the heinous AMPTP tactic on holding out until writers begin losing their homes.
“That’s a huge injustice. As a staff writer, you’re writing and revising for everyone but the residuals are cents on the dollar with Hulu [and Disney+] because it’s streaming… They publicly say it’s a necessary evil. They publicly say they are evil, so what do you think they say privately at the bargaining table? It’s sick, vile and disgusting.”
Newsflash; the success of The Bear, which is streamed on Hulu and Disney Plus, has absolutely nothing to do with Iger’s involvement or that of any other suit who wouldn’t know dialogue from stage directions; it has everything to do with the hard work of actors, writers, and countless other creatives who pull together to create fantastic works that capture hearts all over the world. Sure, Bob, maybe they’re just greedy.