This past week the Screen Actors Guild – American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) officially joined the Writer’s Guild of America (WGA) on strike. According to ComicBook, actors are already feeling the negatives of this strike. The strikers are fighting the dangers of artificial intelligence in the industry and the complicated nature of residual payments within past series and films. Actors of the Marvel show Runaways are already feeling the negative side of residuals. Ariela Barer (How to Blow Up a Pipeline, Atypical), who portrays Gert Yorkes on Runaways, says that the series was removed from Disney+ “without any warning.”
Runaways was originally conceived and premiered on Hulu in 2017 and continued until 2019. Unexpectedly, the series was removed from both Disney+ and Hulu on May 27 of this year. While individual episodes are still available for purchase on different platforms like Apple TV+, even so, the cast is allegedly receiving far less in residual payments than they were before.
In regards to the removal of Runaways, CEO of Disney Bob Iger (One Day at Disney, The Pixar Story) said “as we grow the business in terms of the global footprint, we realized that we made a lot of content that is not necessarily driving sub growth, and we’re getting much more surgical about what it is we make. So as we look to reduce content spin, we’re looking to reduce it in a way that should not have any impact of SOPs. We believe that there’s an opportunity for us to focus more on real sub drivers.” According to ComicBook, Iger also stated that the demands of the WGA and SAG-AFTRA are “unrealistic.”
Barer commented on the words of Iger saying that “it doesn’t feel great to read those comments, it doesn’t feel great to read that your labor is not appreciated. I think that what we were asking for is incredibly realistic, and incredibly important. We’re asking for basic respect for our work.”