L.A. Times: Media and Entertainment Company Executive Compensation

“Of the top 30 highest-paid CEOs in America, 27% come from the media and entertainment space, even though the entertainment and media sector accounts for only about 7% of the GDP.”

Some issues the Writers Guild is striking about may be a bit too complex for the typical movie and television audience to grasp. But this point isn’t: Why are CEOs of entertainment and media companies receiving so much compensation with increasing pay over the last several years while claiming their companies cannot afford to pay writers?

The Los Angeles Times featured an article yesterday: Hollywood writers say the bosses make too much. This is what our analysis found. Some excerpts:

Many of the concerns motivating the current Writers Guild of America’s strike — from streaming residuals to the looming threat of AI displacement — are distinctly 2023 problems.

But, speaking from a picket line outside Fox Studios in Century City, Mike Royce framed the WGA’s campaign in terms of a more timeless struggle: Workers make too little, and bosses too much.

“If they don’t have any money to give us raises, then how did they — the executives in the C-suite — amass such record salaries?” asked Royce, co-creator of TNT’s “Men of a Certain Age” and the co-showrunner behind Netflix’s “One Day at a Time” reboot. “The difference between CEO pay and worker pay has never been greater in most industries, but in this industry it’s even worse.”

It’s a recurring theme on picket lines across Los Angeles and New York: writers say they’ve been shortchanged by the streaming revolution even as their employers were richly rewarded. “We Just Want 2% From the 1%,” read one recent picket sign that reflected the Occupy Wall Street-esque rhetoric used by the WGA.

A Times review of executive compensation at 10 publicly held media and entertainment companies supports that narrative.

Pay for Hollywood’s top executives soared during the height of the pandemic, climbing to $1.43 billion in 2021, up 50% from total pay in 2018, according to a Times analysis of data compiled by the research firm Equilar Inc. [emphasis added]

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