EXCLUSIVE: SAG-AFTRA are already lined up to be the first Tinseltown guild to kick off the 2026 contract negotiations with the studios and streamers and both sides have some big asks of the other.
Put very simply, the now Greg Hessinger-led AMPTP are preparing to offer the actor’s union, the Christoper Nolan-run DGA and the WGA a massive injection of cash to get their respective Health Plan in tip-top shape, Deadline has learned. In response, the studios and streamers want to the guilds to agree to shift their contract lengths from the current three-year span to more like five-years.
Nothing has been officially put in writing yet and SAG-AFTRA isn’t even scheduled to sit down with ex-SAG boss Hessinger and his Sherman Oaks Galleria gang until early February. However, as mandarin Ken Ziffren noted back in October when the attorney said that “insiders know one of the three Guilds has only a six-month reserve,” the AMPTP has pretty much lined up the studios and streamers (and whoever owns or does not own Warner Bros Discovery that week) with a figure to out on the table.
The AMPTP is prepared to offer the WGA, the now Sean Astin-led SAG-AFTRA and the DGA (who has the healthiest Health Plan of the three) around $110 million to get the “Cadillac” plans, as Ziffren termed them, in the black ASAP.
The plans are “running huge deficits on a month by month basis,” a well-versed studio and streamer source tells us. “It’s not sustainable, it has to be addressed.”
Ted Sarandos, then SAG-AFTRA president Fran Drescher, & union National Executive Director Duncan Crabtree-Ireland at the 31st Screen Actors Guild Awards on Feb 23, 2025 in LA (Photo by Gilbert Flores/Variety via Getty Images)
Of course, nothing comes without a price or a cost, especially in what is looking increasingly like Ted Sarandos’ town — especially after the leadership role the Netflix co-CEO took in reaching a deal in 2023 to end the scribes and actors’ strikes. There is talk that the AMPTP will ask the guilds in their talks next year to consider trimming their Health Plans both in terms of services and perhaps even eligibility.
When it comes to a longer overall contract overall, the key term is stability, we hear.
Citing a need for such stability in an ever changing industry that has been kneecapped in recent years by one crisis after another may be a bit of a stretch with more than a few of the instabilities of recent years and production declines being of the C-Suites own making. Still, the AMPTP’s post-pandemic, post-strikes and post-wildfires logic is that extending the overall contracts with the WGA, DGA and SAG-AFTRA will allow those same C-Suites to focus more on production, money and, well making money – which they will argue is good for jobs in an era of layoffs galore and declining bi-coastal production.
To the below-the-line workers longer deals will offer the promise, in the rose-tinted glasses AMPTP POV, of greater job security in a less antagonistic labor environment.
Of course, to some that’s just another agreement not worth the paper it will be printed up on.
“Longer contracts mean less reasons for the studios and the AMPTP to pay attention to labor,” a top Writers’ Guild insider told Deadline today. “That’s less attention to AI, residuals and mergers, and that’s not a good place for us.”
The AMPTP did not respond to Deadline’s request for comment on the notion of longer contracts with the Guilds nor Health plan funding. On the other side of the table, literally and figuratively, the WGA did not respond to request for comment on the same kinda big deal topics either. The DGA and SAG-AFTRA did get back to us, but both declined to comment
Additionally, with David Zaslav and WBD locked in to sell their studio and streamer assets to Netflix for $83 billion despite a newly amended hostile takeover offer of $108 billion from David Ellison‘s Paramount for the whole company, all of the guilds have expressed strong displeasure with further consolidation. With AI and residuals certain to be on the agenda for the guilds along with those heavily subscribed Health Plans, the WGA and others have been lining up their bargaining committees for next year’s negotiations.
Just like in those long picket line filled days of 2023, Ellen Stuzman will once again be leading the writers, the WGA announced early in November.
Under the present labor agreements, the WGA’s deal expires on May 1, 2026, and the SAG-AFTRA and DGA deals are up on June 30. Word on the street is that no one expects those dates not to be meet with new deals well before their respective deadlines, AI or …well, more AI.
