Studio CEOs attend today’s meeting with the WGA – IndieWire

The Writers Guild and AMPTP returned to the negotiating table today and are currently joined by top CEOs from AMPTP member companies.

Disney’s Bob Iger, NBCUniversal’s Donna Langley, Netflix’s Ted Sarandos and Warner Bros. Discovery’s David Zaslav are all present at the meeting at AMPTP headquarters, which began at 10 a.m. PT on Wednesday, IndieWire has confirmed. Because the strike is nearly the longest in the guild’s history, it has pushed studio CEOs to be more active in negotiations and suggests greater urgency in this latest round of talks.

The CEOs held a preparatory Zoom call ahead of the meeting and also clarified their schedules to prepare for what could be a long night, although that depends on the discussions going well.

The last time the studio CEOs met with WGA leadership, things weren’t going so well. The WGA previously announced that Iger, Langley, Sarandos and Zaslav all met with the negotiating committee on August 22nd. Multiple sources IndieWire spoke to previously suggested that if the studio CEOs met directly with WGA leadership, they did so with the expectation that a deal would be struck.

That didn’t happen. Instead, the AMPTP publicly released the details of its proposal on August 11, prompting the WGA to say that it was full of loopholes and simply “not good enough,” and that it had been greeted by CEOs with a lecture about it how important the offer was. This standoff lasted for weeks but finally ended today.

The WGA recently told members that as talks resume, it expects not to hear from them for some time during negotiations. The AMPTP has stated that it is committed to finding a solution to end the strikes.

THR first reported the news. The WGA and AMPTP did not immediately respond to a request for comment.