Picking up where we left off, starting with the industry brain drain:
Total employment of Writers Guild of America screenwriters has fallen sharply in recent years.
Between 2020 and 2024, the number of feature-film screenwriters declined by roughly 12 percent -- a loss of nearly 300 jobs. TV has had it worse, hit by a decline in TV subscriptions and cable programming, the end of the streaming boom, fewer series orders, and shorter “seasons.” (In the old days, a TV show’s season could run to two dozen episodes; now, it’s more likely to be eight or fewer.) As a result, TV series writing jobs fell by nearly 600 between 2020 and 2024. The 2023–24 television season was particularly rough: only 1,819 total writing jobs, a 42 percent decline from the prior season.
And then there’s the artificial intelligence problem.
Though writers sent a clear message in 2023 with an industry-wide strike, the problem didn’t go away. Major studios, including Netflix, Warner Bros., and Paramount, are still outsourcing portions of production and creation to machines. It is too attractive a proposition: use a robot to do faster and for free what once required paying humans for their labor.
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