The 2023 Emmy awards have been pushed back four months to 15 January 2024 due to the ongoing writers’ and actors’ strikes in Hollywood, the Television Academy and ceremony broadcaster Fox said in a joint announcement on Thursday.
This is the first time the Emmys, the highest honours in television, have been postponed since 2001, when the 9/11 terrorist attacks pushed the ceremony, normally held in September, to November.
The 2023 Emmy nominations were announced last month, with Succession, The Last of Us, The White Lotus and Ted Lasso leading the nominees. The announcement fell 48 hours before Hollywood actors went on strike, joining film and television writers who have been on picket lines since May, after talks with the major studios broke down.
The Creative Arts Emmy awards, which honour artistic and technical achievements in television, have also been moved and will now take place on 6 and 7 January.
It first emerged last month that the 2023 Emmys would likely move from its 18 September date when vendors for the event revealed to Hollywood trade publications that they had been told to prepare for an imminent date change.
The four-month delay reflects the mood in Hollywood that any deal between the Writers Guild of America (WGA) and actors guild Sag-Aftra with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) appears to not be imminent.
Actors and writers remain firm that they want residual payments to become viewership-based, to address the minuscule pay some have received from streaming services for huge hits. They also want to see higher minimum staffing levels on shows, and for studios to address their concerns about artificial intelligence.
Meanwhile, the AMPTP continues to be unwilling to discuss overhauling residuals, maintaining a bullish line that writers and actors will run out of money before they do. Last month, Deadline quoted an unnamed studio executive who said: “The endgame is to allow things to drag on until union members start losing their apartments and losing their houses.”
The former Fox and Paramount boss Barry Diller has suggested that studio heads and A-listers should agree to a 25% pay cut to address inequality – a move met with silence from those who would take the hit.
The Disney CEO, Bob Iger, who is paid more than $70,000 a day, has been criticised for describing the strikes as “very disturbing” and the actors’ and writers’ unions as having “a level of expectation that they have that is just not realistic”.
The Los Angeles Times previously reported that any new date for the Emmys would be contingent on a resolution to disputes between the studios and guilds before then.
More than a dozen film stars, including Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, Meryl Streep, Leonardo DiCaprio and Nicole Kidman, have donated a combined US$15m to Sag-Aftra’s emergency hardship fund to support actors who are struggling without work.
The Sag-Aftra Foundation president, Courtney B Vance, said they were dealing with “more than 30 times our usual number of applications for emergency aid”.
