Sony Pictures Entertainment chairman and CEO Tony Vinciquerra has stressed that studios want to get back into the negotiating room with the actors’ and writers’ unions in a bid to bring the strike to an end.
Speaking at the Audiovisual Producers Summit in Trieste, Vinciquerra said: “We are very dismayed by these strikes, we entered negotiations with WGA and SAG intending to make a deal, wanting to make a deal. There are lots of headlines saying the opposite, that is absolutely untrue. We need to do a deal, we want to do a deal.”
Vinciquerra added: “We value our writers, we value our actors – they are very important partners to us as we produce both film and television. We want to get this done… we want to get back in the negotiating room.”
The Sony Pictures Entertainment head said he was troubled by the number of people who are out of work “who don’t have a dog in the hunt with the unions. They just can’t work and that is a very bad side effect.”
He added that it was important to “lower the volume” in terms of the rhetoric about the strike.
“It is a strange world right now. Coming out of the pandemic, you are seeing this labour aggression – in virtually every place, the schools system, hotels system in Los Angeles, the court workers. Something is happening in the zeitgeist.”
He said the most recent offer by the studios through the Alliance Of Motion Picture And Television Producers (AMPTP) to the SAG-AFTRA group “was the best offer that’s ever been made” to the union.
Vinciquerra was on a panel at the AVP Summit with Eagle Pictures owner Tarak Ben Ammar, who said that he didn’t think the strike would increase demand for European content in America.
Ben Ammar said: “The strike is not good for the industry as a whole… the European films that we were making were not in the American market anyway, and they are not going to fill that void just because there is less films.” He did say that some US directors could come and make European movies, and that he was making “a few” with US directors.
Indie film challenges
Elsewhere Vinciquerra addressed the challenges facing the distribution of international movies in the US, saying its Sony Pictures Classics (SPC) division had been disrupted by the streamers.
Vinciquerra said that in the past SPC would go to film markets and buy a film for $2-3m and distribute it. “Streamers are now paying $8-10-12m dollars. Coda went for $25m and won the Academy Award. That is a film we would have loved to buy. That market is challenged because of the streamers. We just can’t afford to purchase those films and put them in the theatres because you can’t generate the kind of box office you need. The streamers are really probably the marketplace for targeted, genre movies going forward.”
Vinciquerra added: “The bar for theatrical is very high. You can get very damaged by having a film that doesn’t do well in theatres. We had a couple that didn’t do well.”
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