These are people with experience in the industry, not newbies who have no clue about how things work. How difficult would it be for them to create their own worker owned economy?
Couldn’t they spend the rest of the year setting this up?
It would be rough going; the larger studios have a lot of power. However it has been done before. United Artists was started by Charlie Chaplain, Mary Pickford, D.W. Griffith, and Douglas Fairbanks in 1919. UA was eventually bought by WB for $350 million in 1981.
Were you to take the four most well paid artists currently, Dwayne Johnson, Tom Cruise, Tyler Perry, and Brad Pitt (combined net worth of nearly $2.7 billion), they could probably start a studio on their own.
I don’t think the issue is the economy of it, rather politics. The current studios have so much power that they will need to fight them at every step. From marketing, distributions to IPs and licenses. If you think they can afford this battle, you gotta remember who was paying them in the first place
Yeah, writers and actors who did that would probably have a lot of difficulty getting gigs in mainstream Hollywood studios. Any actor who is already rich and doesn’t care about extreme fame could easily do it, but I think a lot of rich famous actors are kind of addicted to gigantic paychecks and fame…
How big are these two guilds? Their combined power should be able to tell the money-guzzling old-guard to shove it. And them not getting gigs with the old-guard would be the point, no? Why create a new studio to then work with the old one?
The entire cast of Oppenheimer walked away from their premier and striked.