Comedian Andrew Schulz sent out five tweets, Friday, which dealt the most devastating blow to mainstream Hollywood.
Schulz, best known for being funny as heck and not giving a crap, shared five different tweets regarding his thoughts on the Screen Actors Guild and Writers Guild of America strikes. He started by assessing the situation: “the real issue is that actors and writers want fair residual payments from [streaming services],” but to be able to develop a metric for a share of those residual payments, streaming services first have to release the data on how many folks are actually watching their shows.
“My suspicion is that the streamers are refusing to share the viewership [numbers]’s NOT because they’re being cheap BUT because no one is watching AND revealing extremely low viewership would kill the stock price,” Schulz continued.”If most of these streamers are losing money in an effort to gain market share the ONLY justification for their spending is their stock price being high.”
Thoughts On The Hollywood Strike:
1) The real issue is that actors and writers want fair residual payments from the streamers.
In order to define what is fair the streamers will need to share how many people are actually watching their shows.
And here lies the problem…
— Andrew Schulz 👑HEZI (@andrewschulz) July 21, 2023
“So SAG and the WGA may have absolutely screwed themselves and their industry by fighting for key metrics on actual streaming viewership. If these companies don’t have the number of viewers they suggest they do, then admitting this would tank their stock, and guarantee that thousands of writers and actors never get their chance in the ever-dimming spotlight.
If streaming companies do have the views, then the additional money they’ll have to fork out for actors would also mean a drastic cut-back on shows, Schulz argued. (RELATED: Ohhhh, Now We Understand Why They Wanted Andrew Schulz To Edit His Comedy Special)
“If the actors and directors strike is successful by making the streamers release their real viewership… The strike will essentially force the streamers to hire less actors and directors. So they’re striking themselves out of work,” he concluded. And it is almost impossible to argue with his logic.