Striking Hollywood Workers Are Demanding a Cut of Streaming Revenue. They Can Look to Michael Jordan for Precedent.
In Air, Amazon valorizes Michael Jordan’s mother, Deloris, for demanding a continuous cut of Nike’s Air Jordan sales. Now, that same studio is balking at very similar demands of ongoing compensation from its workers.
Writers walk the picket line on the third day of the television and movie writers strike outside of Amazon Studios in Culver City, California, on May 3, 2023. (Photo by Frederic J. Brown / AFP via Getty Images)
One of the major conflict points in the ongoing Hollywood strikes is actors and writers’ demands for tiny shares of the money that audiences pay to watch their work on screen. As they pay their executives millions, the studios have reportedly refused to give in to actors’ request that they receive a mere 2 percent of the streaming revenues that those actors generate. Studios have also refused to give writers a bigger share of residuals that studios earn off their scripts.
And yet, less than three months before the impasse, one of the world’s largest studios released and promoted a film valorizing this very demand — affirming the ultimatum’s morality in the never-ending battle between capital and labor.
In April, Amazon released Air — described by the company as a film about the “game-changing partnership between a then-undiscovered Michael Jordan and Nike’s fledgling basketball division, which revolutionized the world of sports and culture with the Air Jordan brand.”
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