Simpsons Renewed Thru Season 25; Cast Comes to Agreement on Pay Cuts
In order for the long-running animated series to continue, the voice actors back down.
UPDATE: FOX has now officially confirmed The Simpsons will be back and that they have in fact renewed the series for not just one but two more seasons, meaning Season 24 and Season 25 of The Simpsons are on the way. This will bring the series to an astounding 559 episodes.
Not made explicit one way or the other is whether they intend for the show to end with Season 25… which likely means that decision is still not made yet.
Original story follows.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, The Simpsons' voice cast has agreed to a pay cut.
No, it won't be as severe as the 45% cut that FOX originally wanted last Monday, which would have dropped the $400,000 they get per episode to around $250,000. So this is somewhat of a small victory for the cast. But on the flip side of this is the fact that they still will not get any back-end percentage of the Simpsons franchise profits like they had originally countered with.
The cast includes: Dan Castellaneta (Homer, Grampa Simpson, Krusty the Clown, and others), Julie Kavner (Marge and others), Nancy Cartwright (Bart and others), Yeardley Smith (Lisa), Hank Azaria (Moe, Chief Wiggum and Apu), and Harry Shearer (Mr. Burns, Principal Skinner, and Ned Flanders, more…). Their decision to take a cut in salary follows the series producers themselves agreeing to a pay cut earlier this morning. But the big difference there is that the several of the producers, in fact, have the kind of "back end" deal that the cast wanted.
In fact, just this morning Harry Shearer released a statement where he said "I'm willing to let them cut my salary not just 45% but more than 70% – down to half of what they said they would be willing to pay us. All I would ask in return is that I be allowed a small share of the eventual profits."
On a final note here, there was some talk that this, being probably the last salary negotiation the cast would ever go through, would be for one more, 24th and final season. As of this time there has been no update as to whether that is true or whether these cuts will allow the series to continue on past Season 24.
Source: http://tv.ign.com/articles/119/1199000p1.html
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