Three years ago, the Writers Guild of America went on a 148-day strike to fight what it called an “existential threat” to the concept of the writers’ room and the development pipeline, which allows the staff writers of today to become the showrunners of tomorrow.
Building upon the safeguards it secured for that pipeline will be a key part of the WGA’s first talks with studios since that strike ended in September 2023, with negotiations starting Monday. But this time, something else will be the top of mind as the negotiating committee sits down with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers: the guild’s financially crunched health plan.
“The industry is transitioning to a streaming-dominant business and our health fund needs additional funding because of the disruption the media companies have caused,” the guild wrote on its contract website.
As the guild explained to its members on its contract negotiations webpage, the WGA health plan is on pace to run out of financial reserves within the next three years — the duration of its mutual bargaining agreement with the studios — if changes aren’t made.
The plan is getting squeezed from both ends. In addition to the spiraling costs that are gripping all of American healthcare, the steep cutbacks in the quantity of greenlit productions by Hollywood studios means that fewer writers are working and contributing to the health plan. In 2025, the WGA reported $219.8 million in annual contributions, a 9% decrease from $241.1 million in 2022. By contrast, the benefits and costs taken out from the plan’s funds have risen from $172 million annually in 2020 to $281.7 million in 2025, a 63% increase.
Prior to the start of talks with SAG-AFTRA, Deadline reported that the AMPTP was planning to propose drastic increases in studio contributions to union health plans in exchange for extending the duration of bargaining agreements from three years to four or five. After five weeks of confidential talks with the actors’ guild, it is still unclear whether such a proposal was even considered as talks go on pause without a deal. But WGA negotiating committee co-chair Danielle Sanchez-Witzel said that even if SAG-AFTRA agreed to longer contract cycles, it would not be in the best interest of writers to do the same.
“We’re in a period of significant change, so the notion of talking less or putting more years in between when the companies address changes in the needs of their workers seems to us as exactly the wrong lesson to take away from 2023,” she said.
The WGA believes that ensuring the long-term solvency of its health plan won’t be determined by contract talks alone. Tougher talks among the trustees over the extent of the plan’s coverage and where to cut costs as drug prices and hospital expenses continue to spiral will become crucial in the months and years ahead. The health plan has worked with third party companies like Lantern to direct members requiring surgical procedures to high quality, low cost options, but it won’t be clear until after a new contribution structure is agreed upon to what extent more unfriendly cuts will have to be made.
But for now, Mulroney believes that the studios can do much more when it comes to their end of contributions to the plan, including adding feature film residuals towards those contributions, as studios only currently contribute off of TV residuals.
The guild president also pointed out that 4% of the union’s 13% contribution rate has come from diverting money that writers have received as part of the minimum wage increases negotiated in the contract. The guild estimates that $64 million annually goes into the health plan instead of into writers’ pockets.
“We’ve certainly been frank with our members that there may be changes that may be needed to the plan, but there’s some really clean areas where the companies can shore up our plan. The contribution caps have been frozen for 20 years now, and that’s deprived the plan of millions of dollars,” Mulroney said.
In a statement to TheWrap, a spokesperson for the AMPTP looked ahead to the negotiations and anticipated “balanced solutions.”
“The AMPTP looks forward to engaging in a constructive and collaborative bargaining process with the WGA,” the spokesperson said. “Through continued good-faith dialogue, we are confident we can reach balanced solutions that support talented writers while sustaining the long-term success and stability of our industry and its workforce.”
Minirooms no more
In 2023, one of the big issues that caused the writers strike was the use and abuse of minirooms: a term used to refer to when a studio would hire writers to develop a season’s worth of scripts before deciding whether to greenlight a project. Then, if the project was greenlit, only a small handful of those writers, if not just the showrunner, would remain hired for the duration of actual production.
Writers on the picket lines called minirooms an existential threat to their profession, warning that it was depriving younger writers of the knowledge needed about the production process to become the showrunners of the future. As part of the deal that ended the strike, productions were required to keep at least two staff writers hired for minirooms — now called “development rooms” in the contract — employed for the duration of filming.
Sanchez-Witzel personally saw the difference that minimum staffing brought to writers with her Netflix show “Survival of the Thickest,” which produced its second and third seasons after the strike. She said she was able to use a “flex provision” in the contract to make sure that multiple staff writers on the show had a chance to work on set as one of the two writers required in the contract.
“I was able to rotate in writers to come to set, and with their help we were able to get a lot more accomplished,” Sanchez-Witzel said. “We said it in 2023 and it is still true: writing is still happening through the entire process, and having a team during production makes it easier to keep the quality up.”
Along with a push to expand the minimum staffing requirements to productions that shoot outside of the United States and Canada, the WGA is expected to bring back a proposed clause that was dropped in 2023 as part of the compromise to end the strike: compensation for writers during postproduction.
“We have pursued that on an enforcement basis when writers, mostly showrunners, are paid below MBA minimum for postproduction, where writing continues to occur,” said executive director Ellen Stutzman. “We didn’t come out of the 2023 MBA with an agreement on that, but we had all these claims, which we’ve continued to pursue, and have gotten companies to pay writers weeklies and pension health contributions for post and I think we would like to resolve that in this MBA.”
AI still an issue
Prior to the strikes, studios were not interested in including AI protections as part of the contract, arguing that they still were not sure how the technology would be used in the future.
But three years after the strike, AI is making its presence felt in Hollywood. In December, Disney became the first studio to reach an AI licensing deal with OpenAI, bringing its characters to the generative platform Sora while adding user-generated AI content to Disney+.
For negotiating committee co-chair John August, it made the guild’s successful campaign for writer protections against AI all the more important, securing language in the 2023 contract giving writers consent over whether or not to use AI in their work and explicitly stating that AI cannot be used to undermine writer credit or be used as source material. Now, he said, the Disney/OpenAI deal and potential future deals like it will be the center of AI talks for the 2026 MBA.
“It’s clear that the companies will at some point license their IP material that we wrote for use by these AI models,” August said. “And while it’s new technology, it’s still an old idea: When you reuse our material for a new medium, we get paid. So we have to figure out what the right payment structure is for when writers have their material reused for AI purposes.”
As the guild showed in its pattern of demands, there will be other issues specific to writers that will come up. Appendix A writers — writers for comedy, variety and game shows — will once again be seeking further pay increases and employment protections after the WGA successfully negotiated higher pay scales for such writers that work on streaming shows in the category like John Mulaney’s Netflix talk show “Everybody’s in LA” and the Prime Video game show spinoff “Pop Culture Jeopardy.”
The guild will also seek higher compensation for screenwriters, including an expansion of the guaranteed “second step” pay that ensures pay for writing done after the first draft of a feature screenplay and higher pay for total rewrites of a previous script.
While the details have changed, the Writers Guild, which made message discipline a core tenet of the 2023 strike, is still connecting all these demands to the same argument it has made for years: no matter what turbulence or negative trends Hollywood may be facing or how many grim quarterly reports are released, the studios are still bringing in billions off of the films and TV shows made by writers, and those writers deserve more compensation for the value they provide.
“They’re very profitable. The streaming business is doing well for them. They’ve adjusted really well to this transition to streaming to the tune of billions of dollars of profits a year,” said Mulroney. “And so when we come in with these asks, they’re very affordable and addressable. We are trusting and hoping that they will engage in good faith right from the beginning and recognize that these are the kinds of provisions and protections that are going to bring stability to writers in the industry overall.”