Hollywood’s blockbuster strike may become a flop

Munching popcorn, a crowd of glamorous movie people and somewhat less glamorous journalists gathered in a London cinema on July 13th for the premiere of , a new film from Universal Pictures. As the audience waited for the entrance of the movie’s stars—Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt, Matt Damon and others—they were greeted instead by an apologetic Christopher Nolan, the film’s director. His cast had just gone home, he announced. “They’re off writing their signs, to join the picket lines.”The strike called moments earlier by America’s Screen Actors Guild, which coincides with one by that began in May, has detonated a bomb under America’s entertainment industry. The reverberations will travel much farther: nine of the ten biggest box-office hits worldwide last year were American-made, and American streaming services now reach into living rooms everywhere. As the stars face off against the studios, the world’s great entertainment machine has ground to a halt.