Sean Gunn says he gets almost none of 'Gilmore Girls' streaming revenue

“You really need to rethink how you do business and share the wealth with people, otherwise this is all going to come crashing down.”

Samantha Highfill

Alexis Bledel, Lauren Graham, …

Kirk thinks he deserves better.

As actors take to the picket lines in the SAG-AFTRA strike, former Gilmore Girls star Sean Gunn is opening up about his time in Stars Hollow — and why the series’ success on Netflix hasn’t meant much for him.

“I also particularly wanted to come out and protest Netflix,” Gunn told The Hollywood Reporter while picketing. “I was on a television show called Gilmore Girls for a long time that has brought in massive profits for Netflix. It has been one of their most popular shows for a very long time, over a decade. It gets streamed over and over and over again, and I see almost none of the revenue that comes into that.”

Netflix streams Gilmore Girls, but the residuals Gunn is referencing come from Warner Bros. Discovery, the studio that produced and licenses the series to the streamer. Gunn and his costars are paid the same regardless of how many people watch the show wherever the studio places it.

Sean Gunn

Sean Gunn on ‘Gilmore Girls’

| Credit: Everett Collection

Gilmore Girls, which originally ran on the WB (and then the CW) from 2001 to 2007, was so popular on Netflix that the streamer created the 2016 revival Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life, in which Gunn reprised his role as Kirk, one of the town’s quirkiest residents.

Gunn continued, “The CEOs of Netflix, Reed Hastings and Ted Sarandos, give each other bonuses in the 10s of millions dollars. Ted Sarandos made $40 million with the bonuses that they made with their corporate profits. I don’t understand why they can’t lessen those bonuses to share the wealth more with the people who have created the content that has gotten them rich. It really is a travesty. And if the answer is, ‘Well, this is just how business is done, this is just how corporate business works,’ that sucks. That makes you a bad person. And you really need to rethink how you do business and share the wealth with people, otherwise this is all going to come crashing down. I’m happy to be out here and we need a fair deal.”

In fact, Gunn incorrectly blamed Hastings and Sarandos for giving “each other bonuses in the 10s of millions of dollars,” per The Hollywood Reporter. The bulk of Sarandos’ and Hastings’ compensation last year ($50.3 million and $51.1 million, respectively) came from stock options, and bonuses were not a factor per SEC filings.

Correction: The original version of this story has been updated to clarify that the residuals to which Gunn referred are paid by the studio and not by Netflix, and to remove Gunn’s incorrect statement about Hastings and Sarandos’ bonuses.