Union leaders and Hollywood studios have reached a tentative agreement to end a historic screenwriters’ strike after nearly five months, though no deal is yet in the works for striking actors.

The Writers Guild of America announced the deal in a statement on Monday (AEST).

“What we have won in this contract – most particularly, everything we have gained since May 2nd – is due to the willingness of this membership to exercise its power, to demonstrate its solidarity, to walk side-by-side, to endure the pain and uncertainty of the past 146 days,” it said in an email to members.

“It is the leverage generated by your strike, in concert with the extraordinary support of our union siblings, that finally brought the companies back to the table to make a deal.”

The three-year contract agreement – settled on after five marathon days of renewed talks by negotiators for the WGA and an alliance of studios, streaming services and production companies – must be approved by the guild’s board and members before the strike officially ends.

Exact details of the settlement have not been revealed.

“We can say, with great pride, that this deal is exceptional – with meaningful gains and protections for writers in every sector of the membership,” the WGA told members.

But as writers prepare to potentially crack open their laptops again, it’s far from back to business as usual in Hollywood, as talks have not yet resumed between studios and striking actors. Crew members left with no work by the stoppage will remain unemployed for now.

The proposed solution to the writers’ strike on Monday (AEST) came after talks resumed last Wednesday for the first time in a month. Chief executives including Bob Iger of Disney, Ted Sarandos of Netflix, David Zaslav of Warner Bros. Discovery and Donna Langley of NBCUniversal reportedly took part in the negotiations directly.

About 11,500 members of the WGA walked off the job on May 2 over issues of pay, the size of writing staffs on shows and the use of artificial intelligence in the creation of scripts. Actors, who joined the writers on strike in July, have their own issues but there have been no discussions about resuming negotiations with their union yet.

The writers’ strike immediately sent late-night talk shows and Saturday Night Live into hiatus. It has since put dozens of scripted shows and other productions into limbo, including forthcoming seasons of Netflix’s Stranger Things, HBO’s The Last of Us, and ABC’s Abbot Elementary, and films including Deadpool 3 and Superman: Legacy. The Emmy Awards were also pushed from September to January.

More recently, writers had been targeting talk shows that were working around strike rules to return to air, including The Drew Barrymore Show, Real Time With Bill Maher and The Talk. All reversed course in the face of picketing and pressure, and are likely to quickly return now.

The combined strikes made for a pivotal moment in Hollywood as creative labour faced off against executives in a business transformed and torn by technology, from the seismic shift to streaming in recent years to the potentially paradigm-shifting emergence of AI in the years to come.

The walkout by screenwriters was their first since 2007 and their longest since 1988.

On July 14, more than two months into the strike, the writers got a dose of solidarity and star power – along with a whole lot of new picketing partners – when they were joined by 65,000 striking film and television actors.

It was the first time the two groups had been on strike together since 1960.

The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, the group that represents employers in negotiations, first reached out to suggest renewing negotiations in August. The meetings were short, infrequent, and not productive, and talks went silent for another month.

– AAP