No one is saying what the terms are going to be, outside of a 4 year agreement. But it appears that the WGA at least has been able to come to an agreement.
https://deadline.com/2026/04/wga-studios-deal-new-longer-contract-123677...
Producing : Wga has tentative early deal. by Shadow Dragu-Mihai
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Curious as well to see what was in the agreement ....
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Lindbergh Hollingsworth Me too. I wonder why the quick deal, it's not like the WGA to be first in that line. There's some speculation that the deal includes some kind of contribution to the WGA P&H fund, which apparently is in trouble. The WGA has the highest employer contribution to P&H in the industry already - over 24% total. So their fund shouldn't be suffering. It doesn't sound right. Just saying.
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What? No sequel to the writers strike of 2023? I hope this doesn't mean that the industry is learning from its mistakes and changing its behavior. That's a dangerous precedent to set.
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Richard Buzzell I doubt anyone's learned anything. In fact, the WGA, with the highest employer P&H contributions among the unions, may have caved early because... somehow... their pension plans are in trouble... The deal apparently involves an injection into it. That all smells very funny. Just saying, there's speculation happening. However, it is also a different moment for everyone. We'll see what SAGAftra does - whether they extend the sell-out of their membership over AI that they allowed last time or not... I haven't heard a peep about DGA positions yet but I might have missed it.
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Your pension read is the kind of detail people will be missing for months. That is the story hiding behind the quick close. The public framing always leans on residuals and minimums. The real pressure point is usually upstream in the P and H math where nobody wants to look.
On the AI piece, the thing the last round got wrong was treating AI as a single thing that could be fenced off with one clause. It is not a single thing. There is training data. There is tool use inside the writers room. There is generative output in the finished product. And there is synthetic performance. Each of those has a completely different leverage profile and the contracts keep trying to staple them together.
What I would watch in this round is whether any of the language starts to split those layers out. If it does, that is a sign the negotiators are finally talking to engineers. If the language stays blurry, whatever they sign is going to collapse the second a studio finds a clever interpretation. Which will happen faster than anyone wants to admit.
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Eric Charran Good points. My observation on AI is that the studios at least have been looking at it, gen-AI especially because most all other machine learning is supportive and technical. Which Gen-AI is as well being in essence just a sophisticated animation tool with enormous IP issues surrounding it. Those issues per se don't affect the writers much more today than they did last time around. But overall I think the industry understands much better that the issues are.