$60 million?! What the hell did they spend that money on?
Gia: The Screen Actors Guild and the AMPTP (the group that represents the big six, the big six being Sony, Fox (which is owned by News Corp who also owns IGN and Myspace) Viacom (who owns Neopets via MTV Kids and Family) Warner Brothers, NBC Universal, and Disney) are in a bit of a contract dispute. This has lead into some actors who are both SAG and IATSE (the latter is the weaker union, because SAG has a 4.4 billion dollar war chest that they have worked to protect over the last 15 so years) to take jobs before SAG decides to go striking... Hollywood (or Huluwood as i now call them) hasnt done any new work since last year (This partitualer movie was done around the same time before the writers strike.) outside of Marvel and Lionsgate...
The reason for this is because - despite the pooh-poohing on the power of the small screen by many a weeboo, the business is growing again both in Movies and on TV, the fact is that the executives are mostly cowards and want to pretty much "cheat" there way around the censorship of the FCC and make the unions weak. They do this by creating Hulu (sort of like Crunchyfail but just as worse) and say the Internet is the future.
But the problem is that the unions want residuals. One of the reasons why there hasn't been that many good Live action series after 1988 is because after the WGA strike of that year, the writers stopped caring, moved on and the networks started to crumble. It wasn't until X-Files, then Buffy, then Millenium, then 24 then House and Lost that network TV got some respect back. When the WGA got residual rights back in the 1960 deal, you had very experimental and legendary shows, such as Star Trek and Dark Shadows.
The thing is that the Big Six want to move to a Internet base, (where the internet speed is nowhere near Japans nor Korea's so they have no clout) and they don't want to give residuals beyond a certain day for writers and the same with actors. They feel that economic situation is bad not getting better and they must deal with the deal they have gave them. SAG feels cheated because AMPTP went to IATSE (which contains the animators union, which hates anime on the basis it takes away L.A. jobs) IATSE is threatening its members that if it dont vote yes, they will call a strike. Its a mess.
