Sean Astin at a SAG-AFTRA strike at Warner Bros. studios in 2024. (Photo by Hollywood To You/Star Max/GC Images)
Next week, the Screen Actors Guild will begin a final listening tour, holding “Wages & Working Conditions” meetings across the country—both in person and on Zoom—as the union readies itself for another high-stakes showdown with Hollywood studios.
Those negotiations with the Alliance for Motion Picture and Television Producers are set to begin February 9, months before the current deal expires on June 30. That’s an unusually early start to such talks, coming ahead of the Writers Guild of America, whose contract actually lapses first on May 1; and the Directors Guild, which has often gone first and, among the guilds, is generally considered the most pliant.
According to various sources, the guilds did…
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Linnea Berthelsen and Millie Bobby Brown star in "Stranger Things: Season 5." (Photo courtesy of Netflix)
‘Stranger Things’ Lands Right-Side Up: (Mild spoilers ahead.) First, a confession: I was largely indifferent to the first season of “Stranger Things” in 2016, which felt like a mishmash of Stephen King movies (“Firestarter” here, “Stand by Me” there) for kids and the terminally nostalgic. That grew to mild appreciation of the Netflix series as the characters matured and the mythology grew denser, driven in part by the fact that the show was by then a sensation, forcing any halfway diligent critic to pay attention.
So the real applause might come a little late, but it feels earned, both by the extra-long finale and to balance the scales a bit for all the griping leveled at the episodes leading up to it. While the Duffer Brothers probably could have…
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