Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning star, Tom Cruise, is both an actor and a producer in the Film Industry. He started his career in 1981 where he took on small parts in movies, such as Endless Love (1981), Taps (1981), and The Outsiders (1983). Later that year, his breakout role was as the protagonist in the hit film, Risky Business. Then, the release of Top Gun (1985) would solidify him as a superstar. Next, Mission Impossible (1996) would then be his first producing credit in cinema. Since then, he has produced nearly every film he has starred in to secure his creative vision on each project. This experience in both roles prompted the Hollywood figurehead to lobby to producers to find a solution to the Actors strike.

Currently, SAG-AFTRA (Screen Actors Guild – American Federation of TV & Radio Artists) and its 160,000 members have been on strike for less than a week. The protest has led to multiple US-based and overseas film projects being shut down as a result. The Writer’s Strike that began three months prior may have slowed down many film productions, but the Actors strike has nearly brought Hollywood to a standstill.

Here are four reasons for the Actors strike:
- There is not a proper calculation on residual payment collection from streaming services. Many actors have been paid a baseline-fee formula from streaming companies. Yet, most professionals feel the residual payments are not being reflected accurately based on the released viewership metrics. They seek more transparency on how studios determine their residual payments.
- No change in minimum pay. Actors desire a higher minimum wage to compensate for inflation shifts and longer gaps between productions.
- The expense of self-taping. Post-pandemic, there has been a shift to actors taping their own auditions from home. Actors have expressed this new format is time-consuming and costly and requires they learn large amounts of dialogue in a short time span.
- No regulation on A.I. There is no system in place to compensate actors who have their likenesses, voices or written work copied by artificial intelligence programs.

Cruise would use the clout of his reputation to meet with the Alliance of Motion Picture and TV Producers (AMPTP) to help with bargaining sessions. The Guild decided that Cruise’s points had enough validity to be taken seriously. He focused on these two issues:
- Proposing a negotiation that concentrated on stunt performers and coordinators to ensure they are equally represented and acknowledged to the Guild.
- Lobbying on the issue of actors having their likenesses taken from Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) during post-production without proper compensation.

Unfortunately, the talks did not lead anywhere productive. The fact that a notable figurehead such as Tom Cruise, could not make a dent in negotiations, does not bode well for a quick conflict resolution between these parties. Plus, comments from the CEO of one of the biggest titans of the Industry, Disney’s Bob Iger, where he stated that both strikes are “unrealistic” and “disruptive” serves as a representation of the mindset of many studio executives. It is pitiful that the creation of art must suffer due to this ideological clash, but this stalemate should send a message to producers that one cannot make money from art if there are no artists to create it.