This strike was always about power, not money
Apparently I'm not the only one who noticed that Nikke Finke reported that a trusted and accurate source had told her that a deal was mostly already in place between the WGA and AMPTP, when later just days after it became obvious that not only was a deal not in place, but that both sides hadn't even gotten on to new proposals yet and were still rehashing their old ones to get caught up for the first time in over three weeks.
Says AICN:
This begs at least two questions:
1) How did the “many” pull “March” out of their hinders? Variety fails to explain!
2) What the deuce was Nikki Finke’s source talking about last weekend with all that business about a WGA/AMPTP deal being “done, basically”?
As I've said on this previously, this is what happens when you rely too heavily on anonymous sources that don't really need or deserve anonymity, and people who have something to gain by spinning a specific point of view. Nikke knows this and yet continues doing it anyway. This is why I find it so strange that people fall all over themselves to recommend her site as the top place to go for news, when all it is is the top place to go for rumors that turn out to be false.
As for what Variety said, I'm guessing they simply pulled it out of their ears. The longer the strike goes on, the more damage it does to these companies bottom lines - far more damage than it will do even if hundreds of writers lose their homes and have to leave their writing careers behind for good.
All these companies are publicly traded and while it's probably true that their shareholders are just as anti-union as their CEOs are, there is one overriding incentive they have that their board of directors and CEO do not: stopping the bleeding. The shareholders are ultimately the ones who are losing the most money from the falling stock prices. Eventually they are going to say enough is enough and start putting pressure on management to make this entire thing go away.
Perhaps March is when the losses will reach a critical point beyond which these congloms won't go.
If this were an ideal world, the CEOs who let it get this far would be punished by the board of directors for causing a potentially record setting loss that absolutely dwarfs the pay outs demanded by writers. This has always been a simple matter of principle for these guys about not being told what to do, it has never been about greed or fairness.
I don't know what these shareholders and directors are thinking right now, but chief in my mind would be why I'm paying these fools $20-$50 million dollars per year when they are about to cost half a billion or more in losses, all because of their egos.
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