Early Saturday evening, the national board for the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) announced they would unanimously back their negotiators in L.A. in rejecting the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers’s (AMPTP) final offer, citing the concerns over allowing non-union work for new media productions.
“For some time, we have been telling the industry how important it is for all new media productions under our contract to be done union and how important residuals for made-for new media programming are when programs are re-run on new media,” said SAG National Executive Director and Chief Negotiator Doug Allen in a prepared statement.
The AMPTP responded with a statement of their own, saying, “The continued refusal of SAG’s negotiators to accept AMPTP’s final offer means that actors will continue to work indefinitely under the expired contract – an old contract that contains none of the $250 million in additional compensation provided by AMPTP’s final offer, and an old contract that provides none of the new media rights and residuals that other Hollywood Guild members have now been enjoying for months.”
And though no one has dared utter word “strike,” the uncertainty over where things stand between SAG and the producers is just one of the three things mentioned as a factor behind pushing back the start production date on Ridley Scott’s Nottingham, which is a re-visioning of the tale that casts the Sheriff (Russell Crowe) in a sympathetic light. (The others are having a green enough forest and the script.)
Still, that didn’t seem to dampen the enthusiasm of movie goers this weekend where The Dark Knight grossed an estimated $75.6 million in the domestic box office, losing just 52.2% of its previous weekend’s audience. The Will Farrell/John C. Reilly comedy Step Brothers debuted at around $30 million and movie musical Mamma Mia! came into third place with $17.87 million, despite adding 14 more theaters.
The only downer note was for The X-Files: I Want to Believe, which grossed only $10.2 million, just barely ahead of two other movies that have already been in theaters for almost a month.