WGA, AMPTP Make Tentative Agreement Official: ‘This Deal Protects Writers’ Health Plan’

The Writers Guild of America and Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers have officially announced a tentative four-year deal on a new bargaining agreement after just three weeks of negotiations.

“The WGA Negotiating Committee has unanimously approved a tentative agreement with the AMPTP for the 2026 Minimum Basic Agreement (MBA),” the guild said on social media. “This deal protects writers’ health plan and puts it on a sustainable path, builds on gains from 2023, and helps address free work challenges. Members will receive more information in the coming days.”

“The AMPTP has reached a tentative agreement with the WGA,” the studio group said in a statement. “We look forward to building on this progress as we continue working toward agreements that support long-term industry stability.”

The tentative contract will be released to members and to the public this coming week following an approval vote from WGA’s national board. In a major shift for Hollywood labor, the contract is expected to last four years instead of the usual three, with the next talks set to take place in 2030.

Historically, Hollywood has operated on shorter contract cycles than other entertainment sectors. Major League Baseball, for example, operates on five-year labor contracts with its players association and is expected to have extremely contentious negotiations that could lead to a lockout in 2027. The National Football League’s labor contract is even longer at ten years.

The three-year cycles for Hollywood unions, which have been an industry custom since the 1940s, have enabled them to keep up with significant shifts in the film and TV industry’s ever-changing financial models, from the rise of television syndication and broadcasts of films to the creation of home video to, more recently, the rise of streaming.

These new advances have regularly led to strikes, as was the case in 2023 as the WGA and SAG-AFTRA fought to establish new rules around compensation and, in the writers’ case, minimum staffing requirements for streaming productions.

Even in contract cycles where a deal wasn’t reached, talks between the WGA and AMPTP have often taken more than a month to complete. In 2017, the two sides negotiated right up to the strike deadline on compensation for short-order series, announcing a deal with less than an hour before the previous contract was to expire.

Which makes this speedier three-week process concluding in an agreement for a longer contract cycle such a radical departure from cycles past. One individual with knowledge of the talks says that the proposal exchanges between the WGA and AMPTP were “way more productive” in the early days of negotiations than in past contract cycles, crediting a “more constructive” approach by the AMPTP’s new chief negotiator and former Screen Actors Guild executive director Greg Hessinger.

A second insider said that discussions immediately began on the WGA health plan, which has seen costs significantly increase even as writer contributions have fallen considerably since the 2023 strike with fewer shows and movies being greenlit. A longer contract cycle was an expected demand of the AMPTP in exchange for dramatically increased employer contributions to the plan, as well as major changes to the plan’s benefits to ensure long-term sustainability.

While those changes are made directly by the health plan trustees, TheWrap is told that the tentative contract will include the changes to the health plan that the trustees will be instructed to carry out with the understanding the studios’ increased contributions have been agreed upon on the condition that those changes are implemented.

It remains to be seen what those changes will involve, as well as what gains WGA has negotiated in exchange for a longer contract cycle. WGA negotiators told TheWrap prior to talks that they would seek increased pay and employment protections for Appendix A writers as well as improvements on the performance bonus structure for high-performing films and TV shows on streaming, higher pay for screenwriters doing total rewrites of feature scripts and increases to minimum staffing requirements on streaming shows.

Expansion of the landmark artificial intelligence protections for writers agreed upon in 2023 to end the strike is also expected, though how the collapse of Disney and OpenAI’s partnership factored into those protections remains to be seen. The WGA had been looking for a compensation model for when studios license out writers’ material to AI companies, but AMPTP insiders told TheWrap that such a demand would face significant pushback.

With talks complete, the WGA’s focus will now return to its own strike being conducted by its 115 staffers, who unionized last year as the Writers Guild Staffers Union but have staged picket lines throughout the AMPTP negotiations as part of their work stoppage which began in mid-February.

That strike, which led to the cancellation of the Writers Guild Awards ceremony in Los Angeles, lasted through the AMPTP negotiations as WGSU members held picket lines outside of the talks held at SAG-AFTRA’s Miracle Mile headquarters. This past week, WGA West moved to end healthcare coverage for the striking staff workers days after the WGSU sent a new contract proposal that it called “strike-ending.”

As for the AMPTP, the rapid completion of talks with the WGA now opens the door for a potential resumption of talks with SAG-AFTRA, with whom the studios had been negotiating for five weeks before pausing to allow WGA negotiations to begin. The AMPTP has roughly a month before talks with the Directors Guild of America are set to begin on May 11.

The AMPTP were also expected to push for longer contract cycles with SAG-AFTRA, though labor insiders said the actors’ guild was expected to balk at that considering that its film and television bargaining agreement is one of several that it negotiates, all of which influence each other. A change in the duration of one bargaining agreement would likely require SAG-AFTRA to make substantial adjustments to its contract negotiation schedules and practices.

The post WGA, AMPTP Make Tentative Agreement Official: ‘This Deal Protects Writers’ Health Plan’ appeared first on TheWrap.