A trio of top content makers — Lionsgate Motion Picture Group, Neon and premium independent production house FilmNation — have agreed to new policies that support Hollywood’s career producers.
The companies will now provide healthcare protection and upfront development fees for producers, asks made by the collective Producers United — a trade group of over 300 power players who advocate for the rights of those who find material, supervise production and deliver films and TV shows to distributors.
FilmNation, Oscar-heavy Neon and Lionsgate Motion Picture Group (Hollywood’s largest independent studio) join a slew of major companies to support basic rights requests from Producers United, including: Warner Bros. Discovery, Disney, Paramount, Universal and Netflix. The group was formed to combat the “systemic degradation” of the producer’s role in show business, per PU. In a November 2025 Variety cover story, the producers detailed bad practices like “credit proliferation,” where nonproducing talent and financiers take full producer credits and raid fees with no merit. Profit participation for producers has also eroded in the era of streaming.
There are now four major companies that have not complied with the producer asks: Amazon MGM, Apple, Sony Pictures Entertainment and A24. Last year, Sony insiders told Variety that the studio evaluates healthcare costs according to each individual project. One source familiar with A24 said the company has provisions in place to address producer needs. None of those four companies provided comment for this story.
Lionsgate Motion Picture Group, Neon and FilmNation will cover healthcare by paying into the MPI Non-Affiliate Agreement for a period prior to principal photography, during shooting and for select weeks of postproduction. Producers can alternatively elect to receive an equivalent reimbursement for other health insurance policies that they require, maintain or prefer.
Development fees, which PU calls “commencement wages,” is a fixed payment producers receive to begin work on a project. The fee, said to be around $25,000, was established in the early ’70s. It has never been adjusted for inflation and is said by producers to be difficult to extract from studios and streamers. The companies will now pay this fee in various tiers, covering stages of script completion and other progress markers.
“Today’s announcement demonstrates that this is no longer an isolated effort — it is becoming an industry movement,” said the membership of Producers United. “We are grateful to the individual leadership teams of Lionsgate’s Motion Picture Group, Neon and FilmNation for recognizing the importance of creating sustainable careers for producers and for joining the growing number of companies taking concrete action … these commitments acknowledge that career producers are foundational creative and business partners whose work begins years before cameras roll and continues long after production wraps.”
PU is also actively working to enhance state tax incentives, establish a federal tax incentive, define and implement AI guardrails.
“We remain committed to working constructively with companies across the industry,” the membership added. “The progress achieved to date demonstrates that thoughtful collaboration can produce meaningful change, and we look forward to continuing these conversations with additional partners in the months ahead.”