Production on Disney+‘s upcoming series Daredevil: Born Again is the latest high-profile casualty of the ongoing industrial action being taken by the Writers’ Guild of America. WGA East released a statement via Twitter early on Monday confirming the disruption, saying:

“WGA members on strike set up a sunrise picket at Silvercup East, where they’re supposed to be filming Daredevil, but members of the Teamster Local 817 and IATSE Locals 829 and 52 are refusing to cross the picket line,” WGA East said on Twitter, with veteran showrunner Warren Leight adding: “Looks like we’re done for the day at Silvercup East as Daredevil has called their day in response to a #WGASTRONG picket with line help from @SAGAFTRA and #Local802.” 

Daredevil: Born Again has been filming in and around New York City for the past two months, with another six months of shooting scheduled. Writers and executive producers Matt Corman and Chris Ord cannot be on set while the strike is ongoing. The series sees Charlie Cox return to the role of Matt Murdock, the titular hero, alongside Vincent D’Onofrio as the imposing mob boss Wilson Fisk, also known as Kingpin. It will bring the series, which originally launched on Netflix, into the Marvel Cinematic Universe for the first time after Cox appeared in both Spider-Man: No Way Home and She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, while D’Onofrio reprised his role as Fisk in Hawkeye.

Why Are the Writers Striking?

The WGA argues that their writers are not currently seeing an equal share of residual payments, due to the rise of streaming platforms. If a TV show is broadcast on regular television and streaming, the latter is paid for in significantly smaller amounts. For streaming services, generally, the writers are paid a flat fee regardless of success but broadcast television uses a “reward-for-success” model that means if a show is a hit, writers can earn more in residuals. Streaming services are also dropping older shows from their back catalogue, meaning writers can no longer earn money from them, and they are ordering shorter seasons—in network television’s heyday, the likes of Friends, ER, Seinfeld, 24, Lost and more would see 24-episode orders per season.

These days, it’s the norm to see episode orders of around 13, with more prestigious shows seeing them capped at between 8 and 10 episodes. The WGA is also campaigning for a higher salary floor and for regulation on the use of artificial intelligence in scriptwriting, asking the AMPTP for a guarantee that it won’t be “used as source material.”

via Collider