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Hollywood Studios Break Off Strike Talks with Actors

The iconic Hollywood sign is pictured on the day members of the Writers Guild of America (WGA) approved a new three-year contract with major studios, in Los Angeles, California, US, October 9, 2023. REUTERS/Mario Anzuoni
The iconic Hollywood sign is pictured on the day members of the Writers Guild of America (WGA) approved a new three-year contract with major studios, in Los Angeles, California, US, October 9, 2023. REUTERS/Mario Anzuoni
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Hollywood Studios Break Off Strike Talks with Actors

The iconic Hollywood sign is pictured on the day members of the Writers Guild of America (WGA) approved a new three-year contract with major studios, in Los Angeles, California, US, October 9, 2023. REUTERS/Mario Anzuoni
The iconic Hollywood sign is pictured on the day members of the Writers Guild of America (WGA) approved a new three-year contract with major studios, in Los Angeles, California, US, October 9, 2023. REUTERS/Mario Anzuoni

Talks bitterly broke off between Hollywood actors and studios late Wednesday, killing any hopes that the three-month strike by performers would come to an end anytime soon.
The studios announced that they had suspended contract negotiations, saying the gap between the two sides was too great to make continuing worth it, despite an offer as good as the one that recently ended the writers strike. The actors union decried their opponents' “bullying tactics” and said they were wildly mischaracterizing their offers, The Associated Press reported.
On Oct. 2, for the first time since the strike began July 14, the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists had resumed negotiations with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which represents studios, streaming services and production companies in strike talks.
When negotiations resumed with writers last month, their strike ended five days later, but similar progress was not made with the actors union.
The studios walked away from talks after seeing the actors' most recent proposal on Wednesday.
“It is clear that the gap between the AMPTP and SAG-AFTRA is too great, and conversations are no longer moving us in a productive direction,” the AMPTP said in a statement.
The SAG-AFTRA proposal would cost companies an additional $800 million a year and create “an untenable economic burden,” the statement said.
In a letter to members sent early Thursday, SAG AFTRA said that figure was overestimated by 60%. The union said its negotiators were “profoundly disappointed” the studios had broken off talks.
“We have negotiated with them in good faith,” the letter read, “despite the fact that last week they presented an offer that was, shockingly, worth less than they proposed before the strike began.”
Actors have been on strike over issues including increases in pay for streaming programming and control of the use of their images generated by artificial intelligence.
The AMPTP insisted its offers had been as generous as the deals that brought an end to the writers strike and brought a new contract to the directors guild earlier this year.
But the union letter to actors said the companies “refuse to protect performers from being replaced by AI, they refuse to increase your wages to keep up with inflation, and they refuse to share a tiny portion of the immense revenue YOUR work generates for them.”
From the start, the actors talks had nothing like the momentum that spurred marathon night-and-weekend sessions in the writers strike and brought that work stoppage to an end. Actors and studios had taken several days off after resuming, and there were no reports of meaningful progress despite direct involvement from the heads of studios including Disney and Netflix as there had been in the writers strike.
The writers did have their own false start in negotiations, however. A month before the successful talks, the initial attempt to restart ended after just a few days.
Members of the Writers Guild of America voted almost unanimously to ratify their new contract on Monday.
Their leaders touted their deal as achieving most of what they had sought when they went on strike nearly five months earlier.
They declared their strike over, and sent writers back to work, on Sept. 26.
Late night talk shows returned to the air within a week, and other shows including “Saturday Night Live” will soon follow.
But with no actors, production on scripted shows and movies will stay on pause indefinitely.

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Entertainment

Movie Review: An Electric Timothee Chalamet Is the Consummate Striver in Propulsive ‘Marty Supreme’

Timothee Chalamet attends the premiere of "Marty Supreme" at Regal Times Square on Tuesday, Dec. 16, 2025, in New York. (AP)
Timothee Chalamet attends the premiere of "Marty Supreme" at Regal Times Square on Tuesday, Dec. 16, 2025, in New York. (AP)
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Movie Review: An Electric Timothee Chalamet Is the Consummate Striver in Propulsive ‘Marty Supreme’

Timothee Chalamet attends the premiere of "Marty Supreme" at Regal Times Square on Tuesday, Dec. 16, 2025, in New York. (AP)
Timothee Chalamet attends the premiere of "Marty Supreme" at Regal Times Square on Tuesday, Dec. 16, 2025, in New York. (AP)

“Everybody wants to rule the world,” goes the Tears for Fears song we hear at a key point in “Marty Supreme,” Josh Safdie’s nerve-busting adrenaline jolt of a movie starring a never-better Timothee Chalamet.

But here’s the thing: everybody may want to rule the world, but not everybody truly believes they CAN. This, one could argue, is what separates the true strivers from the rest of us.

And Marty — played by Chalamet in a delicious synergy of actor, role and whatever fairy dust makes a performance feel both preordained and magically fresh — is a striver. With every fiber of his restless, wiry body. They should add him to the dictionary definition.

Needless to say, Marty is a New Yorker.

Also needless to say, Chalamet is a New Yorker.

And so is Safdie, a writer-director Chalamet has called “the street poet of New York.” So, where else could this story be set?

It’s 1952, on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Marty Mauser is a salesman in his uncle’s shoe store, escaping to the storeroom for a hot tryst with his (married) girlfriend. This witty opening sequence won’t be the only thing recalling “Uncut Gems,” co-directed by Safdie with his brother Benny before the two split for solo projects. That film, which feels much like the precursor to “Marty Supreme,” began as a trip through the shiny innards of a rare opal, only to wind up inside Adam Sandler’s colon, mid-colonoscopy.

Sandler’s Howard Ratner was a New York striver, too, but sadder, and more troubled. Marty is young, determined, brash — with an eye always to the future. He’s a great salesman: “I could sell shoes to an amputee,” he boasts, crassly. But what he’s plotting to unveil to the world has nothing to do with shoes. It’s about table tennis.

How likely is it that this Jewish kid from the Lower East Side can become the very face of a sport in America, soon to be “staring at you from the cover of a Wheaties box?”

To Marty, perfectly likely. Still, he knows nobody in the US cares about table tennis. He’s so determined to prove everyone wrong, starting at the British Open in London, that when there’s a snag obtaining cash for his trip, he brandishes a gun at a colleague to get it.

Shaking off that sorta-armed robbery thing, Marty arrives in London, where he fast-talks his way into a suite at the Ritz. Here, he spies fellow guest Kay Stone (Gwyneth Paltrow, in a wise, stylish return to the screen), a former movie star married to an insufferable tycoon (“Shark Tank” personality Kevin O’Leary, one of many nonactors here.)

Kay’s skeptical, but Marty finds a way to woo her. Really, all he has to say is: “Come watch me.” Once she sees him play, she’s sneaking into his room in a lace corselet.

This would be a good time to stop and consider Chalamet’s subtly transformed appearance. He is stick-thin — duh, he never stops moving. His mustache is skimpy. His skin is acne-scarred — just enough to erase any movie-star sheen. Most strikingly, his eyes, behind the round spectacles, are beady — and smaller. Definitely not those movie-star eyes.

But then, nearly all the faces in “Marty Supreme” are extraordinary. In a movie with more than 100 characters, we have known actors (Fran Drescher, Abel Ferrara); nonacting personalities (O’Leary, and an excellent Tyler Okonma (Tyler, The Creator) as Marty’s friend Wally); and exciting newcomers like Odessa A’Zion as Marty’s feisty girlfriend Rachel.

There are also a slew of nonactors in small parts, plus cameos from the likes of David Mamet and even high wire artist Philippe Petit. The dizzying array makes one curious how it all came together — is casting director Jennifer Venditti taking interns? Production notes tell us that for one hustling scene at a bowling alley, young men were recruited from a sports trading-card convention.

Elsewhere on the creative team, composer Daniel Lopatin succeeds in channeling both Marty’s beating heart and the ricochet of pingpong balls in his propulsive score. The script by Safdie and cowriter Ronald Bronstein, loosely based on real-life table tennis hustler Marty Reisman, beats with its own, never-stopping pulse. The same breakneck aesthetic applies to camera work by Darius Khondji.

Back now to London, where Marty makes the finals against Japanese player Koto Endo (Koto Kawaguchi, like his character a deaf table tennis champion). “I’ll be dropping a third atom bomb on them,” he brags — not his only questionable World War II quip. But Endo, with his unorthodox paddle and grip, prevails.

After a stint as a side act with the Harlem Globetrotters, including pingpong games with a seal — you’ll have to take our word for this, folks, we’re running low on space — Marty returns home, determined to make the imminent world championships in Tokyo.

But he's in trouble — remember he took cash at gunpoint? Worse, he has no money.

So Marty’s on the run. And he’ll do anything, however messy or dangerous, to get to Japan. Even if he has to totally debase himself (mark our words), or endanger friends — or abandon loyal and brave Rachel.

Is there something else for Marty, besides his obsessive goal? If so, he doesn’t know it yet. But the lyrics of another song used in the film are instructive here: “Everybody’s got to learn sometime.”

So can a single-minded striver ultimately learn something new about his own life?

We'll have to see. As Marty might say: “Come watch me.”

Entertainment

Nicki Minaj Surprises Conservatives with Praise for Trump, Vance at Arizona Event

CEO and Chair of the Board of Turning Point USA Erika Kirk (L) listens to US rapper Nicki Minaj speak during Turning Point's annual AmericaFest conference in Phoenix, Arizona on December 21, 2025. (Photo by Olivier Touron / AFP)
CEO and Chair of the Board of Turning Point USA Erika Kirk (L) listens to US rapper Nicki Minaj speak during Turning Point's annual AmericaFest conference in Phoenix, Arizona on December 21, 2025. (Photo by Olivier Touron / AFP)
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Nicki Minaj Surprises Conservatives with Praise for Trump, Vance at Arizona Event

CEO and Chair of the Board of Turning Point USA Erika Kirk (L) listens to US rapper Nicki Minaj speak during Turning Point's annual AmericaFest conference in Phoenix, Arizona on December 21, 2025. (Photo by Olivier Touron / AFP)
CEO and Chair of the Board of Turning Point USA Erika Kirk (L) listens to US rapper Nicki Minaj speak during Turning Point's annual AmericaFest conference in Phoenix, Arizona on December 21, 2025. (Photo by Olivier Touron / AFP)

Rapper Nicki Minaj on Sunday made a surprise appearance at a gathering of conservatives in Arizona that was memorializing late activist Charlie Kirk, and used her time on stage to praise President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance, calling them “role models” for young men.

The rap star was interviewed at Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest convention by Erika Kirk, the widow of Charlie Kirk, about her newly found support for Trump — someone she had condemned in the past — and about her actions denouncing violence against Christians in Nigeria.

The Grammy-nominated rapper's recent alignment with the Make America Great Again movement has caught some interest because of her past criticism of Trump even when the artist's own political ideology had been difficult to pin down. But her appearance Sunday at the flagship event for the powerful conservative youth organization may shore up her status as a MAGA acolyte.

Minaj mocked California Gov. Gavin Newsom, referring to him as New-scum, a nickname Trump gave him. Newsom, a Democrat, has 2028 prospects. Minaj expressed admiration for the Republican president and Vance, who received an endorsement from Erika Kirk despite the fact he has not said whether he will run for president. Kirk took over as leader of Turning Point.

“This administration is full of people with heart and soul, and they make me proud of them. Our vice president, he makes me ... well, I love both of them,” The Associated Press quoted Minaj as saying. “Both of them have a very uncanny ability to be someone that you relate to.”

Minaj’s appearance included an awkward moment when, in an attempt to praise Vance’s political skills, she described him as an “assassin.”

She paused, seemingly regretting her word choice, and after Kirk appeared to wipe a tear from one of her eyes, the artist put her hand over her mouth while the crowd murmured.

“If the internet wants to clip it, who cares? I love this woman,” said Erika Kirk, who became a widow when Charlie Kirk was assassinated in September.

Last month, the rapper shared a message posted by Trump on his Truth Social network about potential actions to sanction Nigeria saying the government is failing to rein in the persecution of Christians in the West African country. Experts and residents say the violence that has long plagued Nigeria isn’t so simply explained.

“Reading this made me feel a deep sense of gratitude. We live in a country where we can freely worship God,” Minaj shared on X. She was then invited to speak at a panel at the US mission to the United Nations along with US Ambassador Mike Waltz and faith leaders.

Minaj said she was tired of being “pushed around,” and she said that speaking your mind with different ideas is controversial because “people are no longer using their minds.” Kirk thanked Minaj for being “courageous,” despite the backlash she is receiving from the entertainment industry for expressing support for Trump.

“I didn’t notice,” Minaj said. “We don’t even think about them.” Kirk then said “we don’t have time to. We’re too busy building, right?”

“We’re the cool kids,” Minaj said.

The Trinidadian-born rapper is best known for her hits “Super Freaky Girl,” “Anaconda” and “Starships.” She has been nominated for 12 Grammy Awards over the course of her career.

In 2018, Minaj was one of several celebrities condemning Trump’s zero-tolerance immigration policy that split more than 5,000 children from their families at the Mexico border. Back then, she shared her own story of arriving to the country at 5 years old, describing herself as an “illegal immigrant.”

“This is so scary to me. Please stop this. Can you try to imagine the terror & panic these kids feel right now?” she posted then on Instagram.

On Sunday on stage with Erika Kirk, Minaj said, “it’s OK to change your mind.”

Entertainment

'Avatar: Fire and Ash' Launches With $88Mn Domestically, $345Mn Worldwide

This image released by 20th Century Studios shows Kiri, performed by Sigourney Weaver, in a scene from "Avatar: Fire and Ash." (20th Century Studios via AP)
This image released by 20th Century Studios shows Kiri, performed by Sigourney Weaver, in a scene from "Avatar: Fire and Ash." (20th Century Studios via AP)
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'Avatar: Fire and Ash' Launches With $88Mn Domestically, $345Mn Worldwide

This image released by 20th Century Studios shows Kiri, performed by Sigourney Weaver, in a scene from "Avatar: Fire and Ash." (20th Century Studios via AP)
This image released by 20th Century Studios shows Kiri, performed by Sigourney Weaver, in a scene from "Avatar: Fire and Ash." (20th Century Studios via AP)

“Avatar: Fire and Ash” opened with $345 million in worldwide sales, according to studio estimates Sunday, notching the second-best global debut of the year and potentially putting James Cameron on course to set yet more blockbuster records.

Sixteen years into the “Avatar” saga, Pandora is still abundant in box-office riches. “Fire and Ash,” the third film in Cameron’s science-fiction franchise, launched with $88 million domestically and $257 million internationally. The only film to open bigger in 2025 was “Zootopia 2” ($497.2 million over three days). In the coming weeks, “Fire and Ash” will have the significant benefit of the highly lucrative holiday moviegoing corridor.

But there was a tad less fanfare to this “Avatar” film, coming three years after “Avatar: The Way of Water.” That film launched in 2022 with a massive $435 million globally and $134 million in North America. Domestically, “Fire and Ash” fell a hefty 35% from the previous installment. Reviews for “Fire and Ash” were also more mixed, scoring a series-low 68% “fresh” score on Rotten Tomatoes.

Yet those quibbles are only a product of the lofty standards of “Avatar.” The first two films rank as two of the three biggest box-office films of all time. To reach those heights, the “Avatar” films have depended on legs more than huge openings.

“Avatar” (2009), opened with $77 million domestically but held the top spot for seven weeks. It ultimately grossed $2.92 billion worldwide. “The Way of Water” also held strong to eventually tally $2.3 billion globally.

“The openings are not what the ‘Avatar’ movies are about,” said David A. Gross, a film consultant who publishes a newsletter on box office numbers. “It’s what they do after they open that made them the #2 and #3 biggest films of all time.”

Should “Fire and Ash” follow in those footsteps, “Avatar” would become the only movie franchise with three $2 billion installments. Working in its favor so far: strong word-of-mouth. Audiences gave it an “A” CinemaScore.

In interviews, Cameron has repeatedly said “Fire and Ash” needs to perform well for there to be subsequent “Avatar” films. (Four and five are already written but not greenlit.) These are exceptionally expensive movies to make. With a production budget of at least $400 million, “Fire and Ash” is one of the costliest films ever made.

“Fire and Ash” was especially boosted by premium format showings, which accounted for 66% of its opening weekend. A narrow majority of moviegoers (56%) chose to watch it in 3D.

The “Avatar” films have always been especially popular overseas. “Fire and Ash” was strongest in China, where its $57.6 million opening weekend surpassed the two previous movies.

“Fire and Ash” didn’t have the weekend entirely to itself. A trio of other new wide releases made it into theaters in hopes of offering some counterprogramming: Lionsgate’s “The Housemaid,” Angel Studios’ “David” and Paramount Pictures’ “The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants.”

In the race for second place, “David” came out on top. The animated tale of David and Goliath collected $22 million from 3,118 theaters, notching the best opening weekend for Angel Studios.

“The Housemaid,” Paul Feig’s twisty psychological thriller starring Sydney Sweeney and Amanda Seyfried, opened with $19 million 3,015 theaters. The Lionsgate release, which cost about $35 million to make, is set up well to be one of the top R-rated options in theaters over the holidays. Based on Freida McFadden’s bestselling novel, it stars Sweeney as a woman with a troubled past who becomes a live-in maid for a wealthy family.

Trailing the pack was “The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants,” which collected $16 million from 3,557 theaters. The G-rated film, based on the Nickelodeon TV series, is the first “SpongeBob” theatrical movie since 2015’s “The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water.”

All of this weekend’s new films will hope the ticket sales keep rolling in over the upcoming Christmas break. Starting Dec. 25, they’ll need to contend with some new wide releases, including A24’s “Marty Supreme,” with Timothée Chalamet; Focus Features’ “Song Sung Blue,” with Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson; and Sony’s “Anaconda,” with Jack Black and Paul Rudd.

Before expanding on Christmas, “Marty Supreme” opened in six theaters over the weekend, grossing $875,000 or $145,000 per theater. That was good enough for not only the best per-theater average of the year, but the best since 2016 and a new high mark for A24. The film, directed by Josh Safdie and starring Chalamet as an aspiring table tennis player in 1950s New York, is the most expensive ever for A24.