In New Zealand, 1500 film workers protested outside a meeting of an actors union in Wellington related to The Hobbit films. The mood was so tense that the meeting was abandoned and another one in Auckland was cancelled.
After local and international actors unions pushed for a boycott of the production for The Hobbit, Warner Bros. threatened to move the production to the now available lots used to produce Harry Potter in the U.K. While the unions have retreated from that position, the future is still murky for the production of the films.
”The lifting of the blacklist on The Hobbit does nothing to help the films stay in New Zealand,” said director Peter Jackson. ”Next week Warners are coming down to NZ to make arrangements to move the production offshore.”
While Jackson has fought to keep the films in his homeland of New Zealand, he says that the actions of the unions, ”had undermined Warner Bros’s confidence in New Zealand as a stable employment environment and they are now very concerned about the security of their $500 million investment.”
Source: Sydney Morning Herald
