Zaslav, of course, is famous for killing a lot of in-production Warner Bros. projects to take a tax write-off on them when he took over. This includes the Batgirl movie, which was in post-production at the time. Crazy to think how many people worked for years on that film only to have it all thrown away at the end like that. If I'd been heavily involved in making it I might have left the industry after that.
Warner Discovery CEO made $498M in the last 5 years– 384x the average writer
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Re: Warner Discovery CEO made $498M in the last 5 years– 384x the average writer
#12Let's ignore the 384x average writer for a second.
A company with a current market cap of $28B paid half a billion to its CEO over the past 5 years?
Re: Warner Discovery CEO made $498M in the last 5 years– 384x the average writer
#13Who did he piss off to get this written?
Re: Warner Discovery CEO made $498M in the last 5 years– 384x the average writer
#14[deleted]
Re: Warner Discovery CEO made $498M in the last 5 years– 384x the average writer
#15Similar gap regardless of industry. Fix should not be industry specific.
Re: Warner Discovery CEO made $498M in the last 5 years– 384x the average writer
#16> " Meanwhile, average pay for Hollywood writers has remained virtually flat at about $260,000 as 2021,... " Somehow any iota of outrage I might have felt just evaporated. Elites griping about even bigger elites don't muster much sympathy.
I thought they were some sort of starving artist making near minimum wage... But 260k on average... Either there must be someone earning millions there... Or it really isn't that bad.
Not that CEOs aren't hugely overpaid either...
Re: Warner Discovery CEO made $498M in the last 5 years– 384x the average writer
#17> " Meanwhile, average pay for Hollywood writers has remained virtually flat at about $260,000 as 2021,... " Somehow any iota of outrage I might have felt just evaporated. Elites griping about even bigger elites don't muster much sympathy.
The average (mean) pay is inflated by the pay that goes to the top writers making several millions annually. The median pay is far less than $260k; the WGA estimate it is now around $70k. I know plenty of writers that were making comfortable upper-middle-class lives 10 years ago that now make less than $100k/year despite working more, on multiple shows each year.
EDIT: One of my friends was a writer on a FOX broadcast show a few years ago. With the writer's room salary and residuals from one broadcast episode script, she and her husband were able to buy a house in LA near El Segundo. She's a showrunner now for a streaming show, but makes less now than she did as a staff writer. For a tech analogy: imagine if you made it to CTO and made less than you did as a junior programmer even though the company was making even more off of your work than it did before.
Somehow any iota of outrage I might have felt just evaporated. Elites griping about even bigger elites don't muster much sympathy.
Yes, this is how everyone outside of tech thinks about tech people these days... Remember that you said this the next time you're out of work and looking for sympathy and people are talking crap about you.
Re: Warner Discovery CEO made $498M in the last 5 years– 384x the average writer
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
How little do they need to make before you feel outrage? Can you still have support and sympathy without outrage? What are some of the strikes in the last few decades where you have felt outrage, and how did that help the strike effort?
> How little do they need to make before you feel outrage? Certainly it would have to be a small enough amount that they might face some kind of financial hardship under normal circumstances. If a company is paying all their employees (which to be clear I know is not the case here, but just as a hypothetical example) enough that they can comfortably raise a family in even the most expensive cities in the world, I'm n…
Like most project based employees, writers make their money when they work, and nothing when they don't.
This means that the years they are making an "average" of $260k needs to offset the years when they aren't landing any writing gigs at all.
And indeed, this is part of how Hollywood pay is structured: the seemingly inflated pay is adjusted for the fact that the work itself is highly sporadic.
Re: Warner Discovery CEO made $498M in the last 5 years– 384x the average writer
#19> " Meanwhile, average pay for Hollywood writers has remained virtually flat at about $260,000 as 2021,... " Somehow any iota of outrage I might have felt just evaporated. Elites griping about even bigger elites don't muster much sympathy.
This is exactly what the elites are relying on. Complete lack of labor solidarity. Writer earning $260k (median for writers in Hollywood is probably far lower) and someone making $40k are both labor and need to be united against capital with resources to get its way with legislature and courts.
Re: Warner Discovery CEO made $498M in the last 5 years– 384x the average writer
#20Zaslav, of course, is famous for killing a lot of in-production Warner Bros. projects to take a tax write-off on them when he took over. This includes the Batgirl movie, which was in post-production at the time. Crazy to think how many people worked for years on that film only to have it all thrown away at the end like that. If I'd been heavily involved in making it I might have left the industry after that.
That's not how business taxes work. You are taxed on profits.