NBCUniversal’s Donna Langley on State of SAG-AFTRA Talks, Vows That Executives Will ‘Spend as Much Time as It Takes’ to Reach Deal

Cynthia Littleton
·5 min read
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UPDATED: NBCUniversal content chief Donna Langley has vowed that the top executives involved in contract negotiations with SAG-AFTRA will devote the time it takes to reach a new deal. But two hours after Langley spoke, the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers said it would “suspend” talks with SAG-AFTRA, saying that the sides are too far apart on contract terms and that “conversations are no longer moving us in a productive direction.”

Langley, who is chairman of NBCUniversal Studio Group and chief content officer of NBCUniversal, declined to say much about the state of talks with the performers union during her Q&A Wednesday evening at Bloomberg Media’s Screentime conference in Hollywood.

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But Langley did express that her executive counterparts in the negotiating room — Disney’s Bob Iger, Netflix’s Ted Sarandos and Warner Bros. Discovery’s David Zaslav– are committed to bringing an end to the SAG-AFTRA work stoppage that began July 14.

“The best way I can say it: We’ve been spending time with the actors and we want to spend as much time as it takes until we can reach a resolution and get the industy back on its feet and back to work,” Langley said.

Langley, Sarandos, Iger and Zaslav have been knee-deep in union contract negotiations for the past month. The foursome came together in August to help jumpstart stalled negotiations with the Writers Guild of America. WGA negotiators met with the executives and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers last month, ultimately reaching a deal on Sept. 24. That three-year contract was ratified with overwhelming approval by members on Monday.

“We feel good about the deal that was made,” Langley said. Negotiations with the WGA proved to be “a difficult one because we had to deal with issues like AI and minimum staffing and things that had up until this point seemed unprecedented,” she said. “Eventually we made a deal.”

During the half-hour conversation with Lucas Shaw, Bloomberg’s managing editor for media and entertainment, Langley touched on a range of other topics including her recent promotion to the top content job at NBCUniversal, her assessment of the precarious state of moviegoing and she detailed her pleasant surprise at the audience that turned out for “Oppenheimer” this summer.

Pressed about the future of theatrical exhibition, Langley emphasized that the industry has been in a nonstop sense of disruption and that the disruption from COVID to the usual volume of new film releases has taken a toll on consumers habits.

“Moviegoing begets moviegoing,” Langley said. “If there’s a season filled with good movies that people want to see — I was made to feel pretty optimistic about what we saw in the summer.” Langley noted that while the global box office has been down 20% from 2019 since the disruption of the pandemic, over the summer it was only down 5%. The summer frame, of course, was enlivened by the pop culture appeal of Warner Bros.’ “Barbie” and Universal’s historical biopic “Oppenheimer.”

“Oppenheimer,” from renowned director Christopher Nolan, was a surprise adult hit at the turnstiles. It became one-half of the fan-driven “Barbenheimer” juggernaut that was embraced by pop culture as Greta Gerwig’s modernist take on the iconic doll and Nolan’s tale of the scientist who led the Manhattan Project landed in theaters at the same time in July.

“I was really surprised at the breadth of the demographic [for ‘Oppenheimer’],” she said. “It skewed from teenagers to all the way up to an older audience. It was pretty surprising.”

“Barbenheimer” was seen as a healthy sign for the movie business in general after the blows of pandemic disruptions in 2020 and 2021 and now the impact of long work stoppages by the WGA and SAG-AFTRA. The lesson from the success of two very different films was that moviegoers responded to finely crafted and highly original titles.

“Where cinemagoing is headed — originality, it matters,” she said. Langley even allowed that Universal’s summer blockbuster “Fast X,” the 10th installment in the studio’s “Fast and the Furious” action-pic franchise, was a bit lacking by comparison.

“Perhaps we are seeing the audience tire a bit of tried-and-true and tested blockbuster formulas,” she said. “I certainly got the sense there was a feeling in the audience, in a way there was a bit of an eyeroll, been there, done that.”

Langley also expressed concern about running out of time to finish movies that were shuttered by the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes in time to make summer 2024 release dates.

“I’m not relishing a summer with a lack of volume of films,” she said. “The lack of volume really does impact the moviegoing cadence. We were just seeing a recovery from that. If we lose that, it’s going to have a lasting, meaningful, not good impact on our industry.”

The discussion eventually turned to the subject of AI, a major sticking point in the SAG-AFTRA negotiations. Actors in lower-rung positions such as extras and background players see the technology as a looming threat of lost work because they will soon be digitally replicated forever. Langley stressed that there are no plans afoot at NBCUniversal to use AI tools in ways that would meaningfully supplant the work of the creative community.

“We’re big believers that creativity needs to come from a human being and be authored by a human being,” she said. “Those things are not happening within my company. I think we’re quite a ways away from that.”

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