Sony Pictures Entertainment Chairman and CEO Tony Vinciquerra has claimed the AMPTP offer made to the actors union was “the best offer that has ever been made to the SAG-AFTRA group.”
In a wide-ranging fireside chat at the Audio-Visual Producers Summit in Italy, Vinciquerra said he was “dismayed” by the labor strikes in LA and added: “We don’t want the strikes to continue. It’s not good for anyone.”
He repeated several times throughout the chat that the studios wanted to “make a deal.”
“We entered the talks intending to make a deal,” he said. “There have been lots of headlines saying the opposite, but that is not true. We want to get this done and we want on get back into negotiations…We need to get this settled. We want to get back around the table.”
Last month, SAG-AFTRA claimed the AMPTP, which represents the studios and streamers, “wouldn’t meaningfully engage on the most critical issues,” as we reported. The AMPTP responded by saying the SAG “mischaracterize[d] the negotiations.”
Asked whether he expected production levels to rise in Europe while the strikes continue, Vinciquerra said: “The natural thing that’s happened is European production is ramping up, but we haven’t seen anything tangible yet [in regards to the strike].”
Since the actors strike began, many European producers have been assessing whether their projects could find American partners as the days, weeks and months go by.
Eagle Pictures Entertainment CEO Tarek Ben Ammar, who also featured on the chat, said the strikes would not lead to European productions “filling the void” because “those films are not in the [U.S.] market anyway.”
Elsewhere in the chat, Vinciquerra revealed Sony’s box office takings for the 12 months starting March 2023 are set to return to pre-pandemic levels. “We will be back very close to the 2019 numbers, which is great,” he said.
This year has seen Spider-Man: Across the Spiderverse, Jennifer Lawrence comedy No Hard Feelings and horror Insidious: The Red Door perform well over the summer. With the ‘Barbieheimer’ phenomenon appearing to have helped Barbie and Oppenheimer to post strong box office previews this week, there is a sense movies might be returning to center stage globally, despite the media and entertainment economy suffering from an ad market downturn.
Vinciquerra added he was “very happy” about the weekend’s prospects thanks to ‘Barbieheimer’, saying it was good for business overall despite the films sitting on rivals’ slates. “It’s time to start asking people to come back to theaters,” he added.
He noted that the devastation of Covid-19 had left Italian cinema-goers hesitant to return — local box office has been struggling — but hoped the quality of releases was changing minds. “We hopefully drive people to theatres by providing terrific product,” he said.