Inside the Directors Guild’s Four-Year Deal: A Focus on Jobs, the Health Plan and AI Protections

The Directors Guild’s new four-year tentative deal with Hollywood studios contains a commitment from producers to lobby for a federal tax incentive, new generative AI protections and the largest-ever employer contribution increase to the union’s health plan in its history.

The union unveiled these details in a message to its members on Friday, which included a letter from union president Christopher Nolan, who extolled the negotiating committee’s work on the deal as “outstanding.”

“We entered this negotiation with three main priorities: secure our Health Plan, protect jobs, and ensure that our members remain secure as AI continues to impact our industry. We succeeded in these areas and gained in many others,” Nolan said. “With these gains, a four-year Agreement was both appropriate and necessary to provide stability and potential for growth at a moment when the industry has been experiencing contraction.”

The DGA has been significantly worried about the decline in jobs for members. That’s after employment in television dipped 35 percent and in film fell 8 to 12 percent in 2024, DGA president Christopher Nolan told The Hollywood Reporter ahead of negotiations beginning May 11. (At the time, data for 2025 were not yet available.)

On that front, the union secured commitments from studios and streamers to send senior executives to lobby for a federal tax incentive in the U.S., alongside the industry’s usual lobbying body, the Motion Picture Association and the unions. The union is also attempting to boost employment opportunities for members by introducing contract language that will place limits on “affiliated hires,” or people who already have a role on a production but want to direct in addition (and have no directing experience), on TV shows. In other words, the TV actor who wants a vanity directing credit may have a harder time making that happen than before.

As part of the deal, the parties also agreed to meet to discuss the issue of non-U.S. directors (DGA members and otherwise) working abroad and hired by American companies outside the DGA agreement. From the union’s perspective, this sets up an unfair situation where union members can be hired for cheaper in the U.K., for instance, than in the U.S. And they secured a labor bulletin forbidding the practice of employers and talent agents explicitly not considering DGA directors for a non-U.S. or Canadian job.

The union disclosed the deal terms just three days after the announcement of a provisional deal between the labor group and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP). The union’s national board has unanimously approved the contract language, meaning the terms will now go to members for review before a ratification vote ending June 25.

Also included in the contract is a significant boost to employer contributions to the union’s health plan: nearly 25 percent over the course of the deal. The caps on employer contributions to the plan will also be raised in various categories (film director caps will increase 62.5 percent, for instance, while UPMs will see an increase of 37 percent).

As the Writers Guild of America did, the DGA also agreed to make changes to the health plan to receive these benefits and help the plan weather healthcare inflation. Its health plan lost $43 million in the 2023 and 2024 fiscal years, according to tax filings. Unlike the WGA, the exact changes that will take place were not covered in collective bargaining but will be addressed by the DGA health plan trustees. Those “certain modest changes” will include “increases in earnings eligibility thresholds, monthly premiums, deductibles and other areas,” the DGA wrote in its summary of the agreement.

On generative AI, the union renewed and built upon its inaugural 2023 sideletter tackling the technology. The union established novel contract language comparing any footage created with generative AI to footage captured by a camera, and enshrined that both fall under the director’s creative purview. The union won some transparency language (if directors are expected to use AI in a job, then their employer must tell them) and licensing regulations (the union must get notice and the freedom to set a meeting if their work is licensed to train a commercial generative AI system with the intent of creating outputs).

Finally, the AMPTP agreed to fund a “skills enhancement” program to aid union members in transitioning to generative AI workflows.

When it comes to wages, the DGA earned a 2.5 percent increase in the first year of the deal and three percent for the next three years of the agreement as well as certain residuals increases. Other interesting details in the deal include a provision requiring TV series to include a “pilot directed by” credit on every episode of the series. The union and the AMPTP also agreed to meet within 90 days to negotiate a bespoke documentary agreement covering docuseries, which up until now had sometimes been covered by the Freelance Live and Tape Television Agreement.

For its part, the AMPTP came into the dealmaking with a goal of getting the directors to agree to what the writers and actors already had: an unusually long contract. And, as their industry peers did before them, the DGA agreed to a four-year deal over the typical three-year deal to clinch unusual benefits in return.

Now, members of the 19,500-strong union will determine if the deal satisfies their concerns. DGA national executive director Russell Hollander led negotiations for the union and AMPTP president Gregory Hessinger led the discussions for major studios and streamers.