Screenwriters earned less from streaming residuals last year than they did in 2024, the first-ever decline in a payment category that had looked like Hollywood’s most reliable growth engine, according to a new report from the Writers Guild of America.
“It is clear that the contraction continues to have an impact on the industry and the number of jobs remains significantly lower than in the peak years of 2022 and before, as a result of the companies’ pullback in scripted programming after years of overspending,” the WGA said in its report, released in July.
For the writers behind the movies and shows families watch every night, this is more than a spreadsheet problem. Scripture is plain that “the laborer deserves his wages” (Luke 10:7), and a shrinking paycheck for the people crafting Hollywood’s stories deserves Christian families’ attention, even when the headline sounds like inside-baseball.
Writers collected $330.7 million in streaming residuals in 2025, down from $346.6 million the year before. Other residual categories — network reruns, basic cable, foreign TV, home video — have been sliding for more than a decade as viewing habits moved online. Streaming had been the one bucket growing fast enough to cover those losses, until now.
Total residuals across every category peaked in 2022, adjusted for inflation, and have since fallen 18% to $535.5 million last year. One bright spot remains: residuals for shows made specifically for streaming platforms climbed to $77.8 million in 2025.
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Streaming pay was a central grievance in the 2023 WGA strike, when writers argued streaming platforms had rewritten Hollywood’s rules without rewriting the paycheck. The deal that ended the strike created a bonus for popular “made for streaming” shows and a new formula crediting international subscribers, changes expected to boost that category by 21%.
The results have lagged the promise. “Made for streaming” residuals grew 38% a year between 2020 and 2023, but only 13% a year since, adjusted for inflation, per the WGA’s figures.
Movieguide® has tracked the fallout from that strike closely. As Movieguide® previously reported, Los Angeles television production fell 54.3% in the fourth quarter of 2023 compared to 2022, prompting FilmLA President Paul Audley to note, “History offers no point of comparison to the present…we have to look very far back…to find a time when production levels stayed so low, for so long.”
Writers’ total up-front earnings have fallen 24.5% since 2022, adjusted for inflation, and the number of writers reporting any earnings at all has dropped 27%, the WGA found. Fewer jobs, smaller checks, and a shakier secondary market are the new normal, at least for now.
That decline in writer pay has come even as the industry’s fortunes recover elsewhere. The WGA reported in February that industry profits are climbing again after the 2022 downturn, and that global streaming revenue grew from $78 billion in 2024 to a projected $88 billion in 2025 — a gap between rising company profits and falling worker pay that’s hard to square, and one worth watching as families weigh how their entertainment dollars support the people actually telling the stories.
Actors and directors in SAG-AFTRA and the Directors Guild of America receive their own direct residuals, while IATSE and other behind-the-camera unions see their share funneled into pension and health funds. The WGA remains the only guild that publishes its numbers publicly, which means its report offers the clearest window — imperfect as it is — into where Hollywood’s secondary market heads next.
As Movieguide® has noted before, the industry’s post-strike recovery has been slower and rockier than studios once promised. Whether streaming residuals rebound or keep sliding will shape not just writers’ paychecks, but the kind of stories that get greenlit — and greenlit stories are what end up in front of American families.
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