Studio CEOs Return to Bargaining Table With SAG-AFTRA

They’re back.

Some of Hollywood’s top leaders — Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos, Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav, Disney CEO Bob Iger, and NBCUniversal Studio Group chairman and chief content officer Donna Langley — are attending Monday’s negotiating session at the SAG-AFTRA national headquarters on Wilshire Boulevard, The Hollywood Reporter has learned. The performers union noted in a statement on Sept. 27 that “several executives” from member companies of the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers would be attending, though the union at that point did not specify who.

The leaders’ attendance raises current hopes, widespread in the business, that the two parties can quickly close a deal. The presence of Sarandos, Zaslav, Iger and Langley during the denouement of the Writers Guild of America’s negotiations was “essential” to reaching their eventual tentative deal on Sept. 24, WGA negotiating committee co-chair Chris Keyser told THR a few days later. Typically, a cadre of labor relations executives handle negotiations for top companies along with AMPTP staffers in union talks, but “by the time the CEOs began to engage again [with the WGA], they did so understanding that these problems that we were bringing to the table needed to be handled seriously, and we had serious, meaningful negotiation,” Keyser added.

And like the WGA before it, SAG-AFTRA is shifting the paradigm of typical industry talks by hosting negotiations at its Los Angeles offices on Monday. Usually, the AMPTP holds talks at a large conference room at its building inside the Sherman Oaks Galleria shopping mall, which gives it a home-court advantage. The WGA flipped the script in its 2023 talks by hosting Iger, Zaslav, Sarandos and Langley at its boardroom for multiple days in late September.

Moreover, no Federal Mediation & Conciliation Service mediators will be present at Monday’s meeting, as two were before the union called a strike in July. The AMPTP initially requested the federal help at that point, which left SAG-AFTRA bristling but eventually agreeing to a single day of intervention.

Monday’s bargaining session takes place over 80 days into the actors strike, which shut down all production over the summer that hadn’t already been scrapped due to the contemporaneous writers strike. The WGA work stoppage concluded on Sept. 26 following the news of its tentative deal, which was struck the same week the CEOs entered the conversation. Now, the industry is anxiously waiting to see if the actors strike can be wrapped up on a similar timeline.

In a member update Monday, the SAG-AFTRA negotiating committee asked its members not to “let up” by turning up to the picket lines and speaking out about the union’s top issues this cycle. “We will continue to communicate updates with you directly,” the committee wrote. “One day longer. One day stronger. As long as it takes.”

Kim Masters contributed reporting.