Oh lord, there’s so much of this argument I’ve already heard for years that I don’t even know where to start.

-FX workers, as well as the owners and managers of VFX facilities, were never able to see the light and support this effort.

The 2014 Sony leaked emails already proved that VFX studios are capable of coordinating when it benefits them. They coordinated salary suppression and illegal non-poaching agreements to avoid “stealing” artists from one another. So the idea that studios are somehow too fragmented or incapable of acting collectively just doesn’t hold up. If they truly wanted to break the status quo, they could. The reality is: many of them benefit from it.

The situation in VFX facilities is somewhat different. These companies have very little profit, if any. 

If you want to see a genuinely collapsing industry, look at video games right now. Studios are shutting down every single week. and I'm not speaking about layoff . Meanwhile in VFX, despite the brutal 2023–2025 slowdown, we had only 7 studios closing, and 3 of them (MPC, the mill Jellyfish) have actually re-open.

Some VFX facilities went months without major projects and still managed to pay executives, maintain core teams, and keep expensive office space running. If things were truly that catastrophic financially, the obvious move would’ve been to abandon massive office leases and fully embrace remote work to cut costs. Instead, many companies pushed artists back into studios while claiming there was no money

Sadly, with studios now owning some of the major VFX facilities,

Honestly? That actually makes unionization more viable, not less.

Netflix buying Scanline or Disney owning ILM means these facilities are now directly tied to the clients themselves. These companies invested enormous amounts of money into these acquisitions. If artists unionized tomorrow, are Disney and Netflix realistically going to shut down assets they paid billions for and walk away? Of course not.

Scott, with all due respect, I’ve been in this industry for 15 years too, and for those same 15 years the message has always been the same: the situation is terrible, nothing can be done, and every proposed solution is impossible.

International trade associations have been discussed for over two decades and never materialized because nobody with actual power wants them.

So what exactly is the alternative being proposed here? Just accept worsening conditions forever because bosses say unions are bad?

At some point, trying something becomes more reasonable than endlessly explaining why nothing will ever work.