It’s easy to forget now, but Hollywood spent the summer of 2023 insisting it was fighting for its soul.
Executives banged the sustainability drum while writers appealed to fairness. Meanwhile, the pundit class hailed the whole circus as a righteous stand against corporate greed.
Then the strike ended. New contracts were signed. Press releases went out, and screenwriters declared victory.
Two years later, the people who supposedly won can’t find work.
NY1 just ran a piece on the state of screenwriting in 2025. Instead of the promised rebound, TV writing jobs have dwindled. Rooms that used to employ eight writers now run with three. Entire slates have vanished as streaming services run more like banks than studios try to model the next quarter.
The writers who told themselves the strike would finally guarantee them stable careers are discovering that the system they fought to preserve died while they were marching.
This is the dirty secret nobody in the guild wants to admit: The strike didn’t wound Hollywood.
As we’ve covered here at length, Hollywood was already bleeding out.
WGA veterans spent years chasing institutional approval. The old model was work hard, pay your dues, climb the ladder, land the contract.
It was the classic industrial-age promise: If you play by the rules, the big machine will take care of you.
But the machine changed. Streaming transformed studios from cultural engines into tech platforms that judge stories by how long they keep a subscriber from canceling. The old season structure is gone. Residuals are a joke. The budget pipeline collapsed. And instead of adapting, the guild tried to strong-arm the new system into caring about the people it was built to replace.
The harsh truth is that the strike accelerated the breakup of centralized entertainment monoculture that was already underway.
Writers expected victory to bring more opportunity. Instead, they got a shrinking pie carved into arcane profit-shielding arrangements. Productions now hire fewer people for shorter gigs. Whole departments have been gutted. Even established writers say their agents can’t get calls returned. The steady salary tracks that once justified moving to the coast are vanishing.
Because the real battle was never over contract language. What everybody missed was that the conflict was always was over the viability of the old model.
The studio system relied on scarcity. A handful of gatekeepers held the keys to distribution, publicity, and financing. As long as the gates existed, they could dole out careers like feudal lords granting fiefs.
But streaming destroyed the kingdom. There’s no network schedule, no syndication tail, and no consistent revenue. Without scarcity, the guild structure that mediated creative labor no longer reflects economic reality.
The institutions that screenwriters trusted can no longer back up the promises they were built on.
The tragedy is that most writers still cling to the fantasy. They want the old order back, complete with the stair-step career trajectory to a big money prestige series. They want a world where a clever pilot script can change their lives.
But that world depended on a concentrated cultural pipeline that no longer exists.
The future is not in studios, but in creators who stop begging for scraps.
Screenwriters who want to survive the next decade will stop thinking like employees and start thinking like owners. They must cater to audiences instead of studios.
The winning play is to serialize fiction on creator-owned platforms, run crowdfunders, launch your own IP, and license adaptations on your terms.
In the end, the WGA strike merely exposed that the 20th century screenwriting career track was already dead. The only stable path left is the one that bypasses gatekeepers altogether.
If you’re a writer still dreaming of a staff job to save you, understand that the ladder you’re trying to climb has already been pulled up.
Don’t think of it as a tragedy, but liberation.
The smartest writers of 2025 don’t waste time and energy mourning the old system. They’re selling direct, building their catalogs, and most importantly, keeping their rights.
The strikes ended, and the crumbling institutions got what they wanted. But creators willing to step outside the ruins will reap the harvest that the old studios can no longer sow.
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Originally published here
English (US) · 