Producing Through the Strikes: What a Quiet Hollywood Means for Commercial Work

For the first time in sixty-three years, both the writers and the actors are on strike at the same time. The WGA walked out in May, SAG-AFTRA joined them in July, and the entertainment industry has effectively gone quiet for the summer. Whatever your view of the negotiations, and mine is that the unions have real grievances about residuals and AI that deserve serious answers, the shutdown is reshaping the production world well beyond studio lots.

Commercial production sits in a strange adjacent position, and clients keep asking us how it affects their projects. So, some field notes from a historic summer.

What it means practically for commercial shoots

Most commercial work operates under separate contracts from the struck agreements, so the shoots themselves continue. But the ecosystem around them has changed in ways every producer is feeling:

• Crew availability is the best it has been in years. Department heads who are normally booked out for months are taking commercial days, and the craft level on set this summer has been noticeably high.
• Celebrity and working-actor talent is complicated. SAG-AFTRA members are navigating what promotional and commercial work is permissible, and everyone is being careful. We have shifted two projects toward real people, documentary casting, and unknown faces, and honestly the work is better for it.
• Stages and equipment are open. Rental houses that quoted three-week waits in the spring are quoting three days.

The uncomfortable truth is that a strike summer is a good time to shoot a commercial. Saying that out loud while friends walk picket lines does not feel great, which is itself part of the story: this industry is one interconnected labor market, and the film side's pain is the commercial side's slack capacity.

What the strikes are really about

The residuals fight gets the headlines, but the AI provisions are the part every production person I know is watching. The studios' proposals around scanning background performers and the writers' fight over AI-generated material are the first serious contract negotiations anywhere about what generative tools mean for creative labor. The precedents set this year will shape terms far outside Hollywood, including in advertising, where the same questions about likeness, training data, and synthetic performance are arriving on our call sheets already.

We have started addressing this in our own paperwork rather than waiting. Every SlipwayStudios production agreement now spells out whether AI tools touch a performer's likeness or voice, and consent is explicit and specific, not buried in a perpetuity clause. It costs us a paragraph and a conversation. It will save someone a lawsuit.

Advice for clients planning fall work

If you have production in your Q4 plans, a few honest recommendations. Book now, because the moment these strikes resolve, and they will, the backlog of paused film and TV work will vacuum up crews and stages overnight, and rates will spike with them. Consider casting approaches that do not depend on celebrity availability, which is good creative discipline anyway. And build schedule buffer around anything that touches struck talent, because the rules are being reinterpreted weekly.

Mostly, though, watch how this resolves, because the settlement terms will tell us what the next decade of production economics looks like. The people on the lines are negotiating, in a very real sense, on behalf of everyone who makes things for a living. That includes the people reading this from a studio in San Francisco.