Iger shrugs off SAG

The Mouse House CEO isn't even pretending to show concern about the contract impasse with the Screen Actors Guild. He told analysts on a conference call that the media companies are just not going to give SAG a better deal than the one they gave writers, directors and the other actors guild, AFTRA. He also said there's not much SAG can do about it. "I think it would be a very, very difficult thing for a guild in this environment to take on and probably rather unpopular as well," Iger said during the tail end of the call, in which Disney reported an 8.5 percent increase in net income (helped by strong showings at ESPN and the company's theme parks). "I can’t really predict what they are going to do, except that I think it would be unlikely that you will see another work stoppage in the near-term." From the conference call transcript:

We find it difficult to offer to SAG terms that are different than those terms that the other guilds agreed to, and believe that the other terms that were offered were fair, given the general circumstances and more than fair to this guild in particular. And so the negotiation basically ended I guess a couple of weeks ago and to my knowledge, there hasn’t been any real progress of any sort or even attempted progress since then. So I don’t really have a prediction in terms of either how this impasse might be broken or where things might go but I can say that by and large at this point, it’s not having a particularly damaging impact on our business because we’ve decided to continue to move forward with at least a number of our productions, and until such time as we feel that’s not prudent, we’re going to continue to basically approach our business in that way.

Don't expect any break in the stalemate until SAG completes its board elections in mid-September. That will provide a de-facto referendum on how the current leadership has handled the contract talks, according to Variety.