The current talks between the studios and the Screen Actors’ Guild have broken off without a deal. The SAG contract doesn’t expire until June 30, so this doesn’t mean there will be a strike; as someone says in the article, two months is a long time in negotiation-land. It means, for now, that warning clouds are on the horizon, a storm’s a-brewin’, and any other meteorological cliché I’ve left out.

I’m not going to try and predict if there will be another strike or not — I have my doubts, if only because the studios’ “make a deal with a smaller union” strategy worked during the writers’ strike (the deal with the directors was in large measure what the WGA might have accepted before the strike), and they’re planning to try it again with the the other actors’ union, AFTRA. Also, the studios really did seem to be acting like they wanted a strike back in November, if only to teach the unions a lesson and get an excuse to re-structure; I don’t get the same impression now, though I may be wrong. But we can all predict that the next month or so is going to be pretty tense.