'Gilmore Girls' Star Protests Netflix Amid Strike, Says Cast Didn't Get Streaming Revenue
As actors continue to strike against studios, Gilmore Girls alum Sean Gunn has taken things to Netflix, where the streamer apparently paid them dirt. The actor had a recurring role for the first two seasons, then was upped to series regular beginning in Season 3 as Kirk Gleason, Stars Hollow's quirky resident who jumps from job to job. He was one of the many on the picket lines at Netflix, where the series is available to stream. Netflix also gave the CW series a revival miniseries, Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life, back in 2017, but even with the massive streamer, payment has not been good.
Via PEOPLE, Gunn told The Hollywood Reporter that Gilmore Girls "has brought in massive profits for Netflix. It has been one of their most popular shows for a very long time, over a decade. It gets streamed over and over and over again, and I see almost none of the revenue that comes into that."
Gunn didn't stop there. The Guardians star then claimed that Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters, co-CEOS of Netflix, "give each other bonuses in the 10s of millions of dollars" and didn't "understand why they can't lessen those bonuses to share the wealth more with the people who have created the content that has gotten them rich. It really is a travesty. And if the answer is, 'Well, this is just how business is done, this is just how corporate business works,' that sucks. That makes you a bad person."
Reportedly though, it's not all up to Netflix when it comes to residuals, as PEOPLE believes that's what Sean Gunn really meant to say instead of "revenue." Residuals came from Gilmore Girls' studio Warner Bros. Discovery, which also licensed the series to Netflix, and they use the license fees to calculate residuals. Either way, though, it sounds like the cast of Gilmore Girls have not been paid nearly enough as they should in residuals, no matter how big the show has gotten on Netflix.
With the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes continuing for who knows how long, writers and actors have been joining forces on the picket lines and protesting at major studios to fight to get fairly compensated. Hopefully, it all comes to an end soon, and the writers and actors get what they deserve, including when it comes to residuals.