Writers Guild Reaches Tentative Four-Year Deal With Studios

The Writers Guild of America has reached a tentative four-year deal with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers group representing studios and streamers.

The writers’ union and the AMPTP officially confirmed the deal on Saturday evening after The Hollywood Reporter and other outlets reported that a provisional agreement had been reached earlier in the day.

“Today, the WGA Negotiating Committee unanimously approved a tentative agreement with the AMPTP for the 2026 Minimum Basic Agreement (MBA) for a four-year term,” the union said. “Crucially, it protects our health plan and puts it on a sustainable path, with increased company contributions across many areas and long-needed increases to health contribution caps. The new contract also builds on gains from 2023 and helps address free work challenges.”

A tentative deal still is subject to approval by the Writers Guild of America West board and the Writers Guild of America East council as well as a ratification vote by members. The union said in its message to members that it would provide further details of the agreement after leadership approved the deal.

In its statement about the tentative deal, the AMPTP said,  “We look forward to building on this progress as we continue working toward agreements that support long-term industry stability.” 

If given the stamp of approval by union leaders and members, the deal will be notable for its unusually long term. Three-year deals have generally been the norm since at least the 1940s for Hollywood unions, as Georgia State University associate professor Kate Fortmueller previously told THR. But the AMPTP had been toying with the idea of a longer contract term to bring more labor stability in the wake of the 2023 double Hollywood strikes, as THR also previously reported.

The guild may have been receptive to that idea as it faced a pressing need to shore up its health fund, which is jointly administered by the union and studios. As THR has previously reported, the WGA’s health fund cumulatively shed $122 million in 2023 and 2024 amid health care inflation and a contraction in industry work opportunities.

The union was also focused on bolstering guardrails around the use of generative AI, specifically by regulating the training of AI tools on members’ scripts or the licensing of scripts to train those tools. “One of the goals in this negotiation is to stake a claim that if our employers are using material that Guild members wrote to enable AI-generated outputs, they must compensate us,” negotiating committee co-chair John August told THR in an interview prior to the start of bargaining.

Unsurprisingly, the WGA also sought to boost income for members through scaling up minimum compensation rates, raising minimums for “page one” rewrites and residuals for reuse in streaming and changing pay rates for writers in post-production as well as comedy/variety, quiz and audience writers.

The WGA followed the performers’ union SAG-AFTRA in its negotiations with the AMPTP, with SAG-AFTRA beginning negotiations on Feb. 9. Yet SAG-AFTRA failed to reach a new deal with studios, it was announced on March 15, shortly after the Oscars. Negotiations are set to continue for SAG-AFTRA later in the spring ahead of the contract’s June 30 expiration.

The WGA deal also comes as the WGA West’s own staff union remains on strike, with the striking staffers losing their health coverage this past week.

The 2026 Writers Guild negotiations represented the first time that guild negotiators sat down with AMPTP member companies, including Netflix, Universal and Warner Bros., among others, since its 2023 strike. SAG-AFTRA staged its own strike partway through the WGA’s 148-day work stoppage, marking the first dual strike for the two unions in more than 60 years.

The tone of negotiations this year has been far less incendiary amid an industry-wide contraction that has hit Hollywood’s writers hard. According to the WGA’s own data, in 2024, writer employment was down 9.4 percent from 2023 — the year of the strike, when employment was already depressed — and 24.3 compared with 2022.

WGA West executive director and chief negotiator Ellen Stutzman led negotiations for the union alongside August and his fellow negotiating committee co-chair Danielle Sanchez-Witzel. Hessinger led the talks for AMPTP member companies.

8:41 p.m. Updated with WGA and AMPTP statements.