Actor Sean Gunn (“Guardians of the Galaxy”) has taken to Twitter to correct a now-removed interview he did with The Hollywood Reporter while standing on the Netflix picket line. The interview revolved around his role as Kirk on the show “Gilmore Girls,” which is currently streaming on Netflix. And the compensation, or lack thereof, he received from the streamer.
After sharing a video of the interview with Gunn, THR removed it. “…because it did not note that the residuals Gunn was referencing are paid by the studio [Warner Bros. Discovery] and not the streamer, Netflix,” THR explained in a follow-up tweet.
But Gunn feels the reason for the removal completely missed the point of his interview.
“This is absolutely absurd. I never even used the word “residuals” in my interview,” he commented on a retweet of THR’s post. “The point I was making is that we DON’T see any residuals for number of views on Netflix. Instead, we see a very meager amount from WB based on the licensing.”
And just to make 110% sure he was not misunderstood this time he also posted a video response.
“The important thing is that the whole point of my interview is that Netflix doesn’t pay residuals to the actors, so there’s no sharing in the success of a show with Netflix,” Gunn explained in the video. “It’s true that they pay a licensing fee to Warner Bros. and that Warner Bros. then pays residuals from that licensing fee, which is a very small amount, particularly for a show that’s been off the air for a long time. But when the show is a huge success and they generate millions of dollars of profits for Netflix, we don’t share in any of that, in large part because there’s no transparency with their numbers.”
Many viewers seem to have the misnomer that actors on hit shows see huge residuals from streaming platforms. Here’s the thing, they don’t. Many of the rules about residuals from streaming were instituted when it was still considered to be experimental. Meaning; the terms are mostly there to protect the business’s resources for taking the “risk” of streaming content. NOT to fairly compensate the creative talents that actually make these shows and movies possible.
One of the ways these companies get away with this is by not being transparent about their viewership numbers. Which is something both the SAG and WGA strikes are looking to correct. Lack of transparency in viewership also played a part in the poor compensation for the cast of “Orange is The New Black” and the creator of “Squid Game” received. Both are also mega-hit shows for Netflix, but unlike “Gilmore Girls” they never ran on network television. So streaming was the only meagre compensation those teams received.
“Ted Sarandos made $40 million with the bonuses that they made with their corporate profits,” Gunn points out in the now removed video. “I don’t understand why they can’t lessen those bonuses to share the wealth more with the people who have created the content that has gotten them rich. It really is a travesty. And if the answer is, ‘Well, this is just how business is done, this is just how corporate business works,’ that sucks. That makes you a bad person. And you really need to rethink how you do business and share the wealth with people, otherwise this is all going to come crashing down. I’m happy to be out here, and we need a fair deal.”
“But really, this is about fairness for everybody, and we just want to make sure we have a fair deal,” Gunn added in his Twitter video. “If a show’s a success, we should participate in that. That seems totally reasonable, I think anybody can relate to it.”
Which is a wonderfully succinct way of explaining the current strikes. Actors and writers just want a fair deal to share in the success of the shows that they made possible.
