• SwiggitySwole@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    Shouldn’t AMC (as the rights holders of breaking bad) be the one paying him residuals? He definitely deserves residuals under our current system but I don’t think Netflix is necessarily the company responsible for that.

    • mayo_cider [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      The actual problem is that residuals are based on viewer numbers, and streaming services refuse to publish those (because their stock prices would crash)

    • Beaver [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      That’s exactly what they’re striking about. Almost all of the long-tail revenue from TV shows past their initial run has shifted away from reruns on network and cable TV (which is covered by their contract) towards streaming services (which, per their contract, they get basically nothing for). That’s a total betrayal of the spirit of the agreement that content owners and the creators had - namely, that the people who worked on the shows would also share in some of the long-term profit from the show. What’s funny about the community note is how it literally doesn’t even contradict any of that - it’s just saying “lol, suck it, we take all the profit now because of how the contracts are written”.

      Aaron Paul may specifically have negotiated more up-front money, at the cost of less residuals. But it’s crazy that he would be getting nothing from one of the most popular shows out there, and it means that everyone else who worked on Breaking Bad who was counting on residual income is getting majorly screwed. We tend to focus on big stars who “made it”, but tons of working actors, writers and others work on lots of shows, and take worse up-front pay so that they can instead be payed out from a portion of the long term profits. Those people are getting ripped off, and so they’re striking to get the contracts changed.

      • some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org
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        1 year ago

        This is all accurate, according to an interview that I listened to with a show-runner. Background actors used to be able to survive on their residuals. Now they get paid for one day of work.

        Further, the writing staff has been slashed. A show-runner gets a room of writers for a limited time and then they’re mostly let go when the season has been written. They don’t get to go on set and learn how shows are made to later become producers and show-runners. The interviewee was pretty explicit about how the studios are setting themselves up to have no “new guard” when experienced people retire.

        I’m going entirely on things I’ve heard and read. I am not in the biz. I might be wrong about details. Feel free to correct me.

    • D61 [any]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      So… I’m not smart enough to remember the exact details about all of this…

      There was the writers strike that happened around 2008 and because streaming wasn’t that big of a thing, the corporations managed to keep streaming stuff separate from non streaming stuff. (Its one of the things that the current writers strike is about.) So what happened is that when AMC gave Netflix the green light to stream Breaking Bad, there was no requirement in anybody’s contract to ensure that they got paid from the deal.