Ted Sarandos Is All “Spin,” Other CEOs “Irresponsible” For Abandoning Talks To End Strike, SAG-AFTRA’s Duncan Crabtree-Ireland Says
deadline.comEXCLUSIVE: Ted Sarandos may have insisted today that he and other studio CEOs want to end the over three-month long actors strike and “get everyone back to work,” but for SAG-AFTRA’s chief negotiator, the Netflix boss is full of nothing but hot air. “Talking about putting people back to work while refusing to negotiate is just spin,” bluntly exclaims Duncan Crabtree-Ireland to Deadline this evening in response to Sarandos’ comments during the streamer’s third-quarter earnings call Wednesday.
Coming a week after the AMPTP and the CEO Gang of Four suddenly suspended deliberations over the guild’s revenue sharing proposal, Sarandos today said after an optimistic” start to talks “a subscriber levy unrelated to viewing or success” suggested by SAG-AFTRA “really broke our momentum.” Led in bargaining by Sarandos, Warner Bros.
Discovery’s David Zaslav, NBCUniversal’s Donna Langley and Disney’s Bob Iger, the AMPTP walked out of talks in the afternoon of October 11 and later phoned Crabtree-Ireland and union president Fran Drescher to say they weren’t coming back after just nine days of on and off meetings.
The studios and streamers asserted the guild’s estimated $800 million a year plan was an “untenable economic burden” that could break them.
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