Marcus Pittman@ImKingGinger
Unions are the worst thing to happen to Hollywood.
Every time SAG-AFTRA or IATSE negotiates, they come away with higher day rates, bigger health and pension contributions, stricter overtime. I get why workers want that stuff. Better healthcare, more money. Sounds good right?
But someone pays for it. You do. The subscriber.
Union labor costs go up, production budgets go up, streamers raise prices. Netflix went from $7.99 to $22.99. Disney+ started at $6.99 and nearly tripled. The content didn’t get three times better. The labor costs went up. A massive chunk of that is union negotiations.
I’ve been building LOOR for five years. I’ve sat in rooms with producers who literally cannot make what they want to make because the second you go union, your $500K budget becomes $2M. Same script. Same locations. Same shoot days. But now you need a union crew, union rates, union overtime, union pensions, union health fund, and paperwork that gets its own line item.
What happens? The mid-budget film dies. The creative risks stop. Everything becomes franchise IP because that’s all that justifies the overhead. The union system doesn’t protect creativity. It kills it. It makes filmmaking so expensive that only massive corporations can play.
The future of filmmaking is a punk rock garage band. Five people with cameras and AI tools. No permission. No $350/day minimums. No forced turnaround penalties. No trust fund you’ll never see because you didn’t hit enough hours.
The best music ever made came from garages. Kids who couldn’t afford studios. People the industry said weren’t good enough. Same thing is happening in film right now. The tools exist. Cameras are cheap. AI fills gaps that used to need six crew members. Distribution is a URL.
The free market is doing to Hollywood unions what Spotify did to record labels. Not overnight. But slowly, making them irrelevant because creators realized they don’t need the gatekeepers or the bureaucracy.
I’m not saying union members are bad people.
The system itself has become a cost disease that makes content worse and more expensive for everyone. The people who suffer most aren’t the A-list actors with residual checks.
It’s independent filmmakers who can’t afford to start because the barrier to entry is artificially inflated by labor rules written for a completely different era.
The future is non-union. The future is small teams. The future is creators who own what they make and don’t owe a percentage to an organization that doesn’t even know their name.
