Hollywood’s Covid protocols will expire on May 12, and the vaccination mandate — which gave producers the right to require Covid vaccinations as a condition of employment — will end for all productions except those that were implemented prior to May 12, which can continue to apply for the remainder of the production or the season.
The Return-to-Work Agreement had been set to expire on Saturday.
First enacted in September 2020 per an agreement between the Alliance of Motion Picture & Television Producers and Hollywood’s unions — SAG-AFTRA, the DGA, IATSE, the Teamsters and others — the protocols allowed productions to rebound after an industrywide lockdown early on in the pandemic. The protocols originally had been set to expire on April 30, 2021, but were extended nearly a dozen times, including in June 2021, when producers were given “the option to implement mandatory vaccination policies for casts and crew in Zone A on a production-by-production basis.” Zone A, where unmasked actors work, is the most restrictive of the safe work zones on sets.
The most recent extension of the protocols was in January.
A statement issued today by the AMPTP says:
Unions signing off on the agreement to end the protocols include the DGA, SAG-AFTRA, IATSE, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, Teamsters Local 399, IBEW Local 40, LiUNA! Local 724, OPCMIA Local 755 and UA Local 78.