Entertainment's 1099 Habit Is Ending Up in Court

For a decade, the fight over independent contractor classification looked like a gig-economy story. Rideshare drivers, delivery couriers, warehouse shuttles.

That's not where the interesting cases are anymore. Look at what's been filed over the past two years and a different industry keeps showing up: entertainment and new media. Actors. Film crews. Reality-show cast members. Livestream performers. Video editors.

The common thread is an assumption the industry has carried for years: the work is temporary and project-based, so the people doing it must be contractors. Courts, agencies, and unions are now testing that assumption, and it is not holding up well.

Here's what's on the docket.

The theater company that allegedly ran like an employer

In DeGroot v. Murder Mystery Company, filed in federal court in Michigan in September 2024, a performer alleges that actors and other performers at The Murder Mystery Company and American Immersion Theater were classified as 1099 independent contractors and, as a result, denied minimum wage and overtime.

Read the complaint and notice what it describes: mandatory training. Company-set schedules and venues. Company-set pay. Compliance with company policies and handbooks. The authority to discipline and terminate.

Those are the classic markers of employment. If the allegations are accurate, the most contractor-like thing about the arrangement was the tax form. By March 2025, fifteen current and former performers had filed declarations in support, and the case moved into mediation. No public resolution has been reported.

These are allegations, not findings. But ask the question the case turns on: if you tell an actor when to show up, where to perform, how to perform, what policies to follow, and what they'll be paid, is that really an independent contractor?

Reality TV's "participant" problem

In December 2024, the National Labor Relations Board issued a complaint against Kinetic Content and Delirium TV, the production companies behind Netflix's Love Is Blind, alleging that cast members were intentionally classified as "participants" rather than employees. Then in September 2025, a former contestant filed a proposed class action against Netflix and both production companies in California, alleging cast members were willfully misclassified as independent contractors and describing extensive control over their schedules, movements, and communication during filming. An earlier suit over cast pay had already settled for $1.4 million, with the companies denying wrongdoing.

The same theory has reached the creator economy. Contestants on Beast Games, the Amazon competition series from MrBeast, YouTube's biggest creator, filed a class action in Los Angeles alleging they were treated as contestants rather than employees to avoid minimum wage, overtime, and meal-and-rest-break obligations. The case remains active well into 2026.

The lesson isn't about reality TV. It's that unconventional work doesn't create an exemption. "Participant," "cast member," and "contestant" are not classification categories. There are employees and there are independent contractors, and the test is control. Not what the engagement is called.

A film crew walks off set

In December 2025, roughly forty crew members on the independent feature The Gun on Second Street went on strike in West Virginia. IATSE, the union backing them, said film technicians reported being misclassified as 1099 independent contractors, without industry-standard wages or health and retirement benefits. The director disputed the union's account, and no court has ruled on anything.

The dispute is worth watching anyway, because it didn't start in a courtroom. It started with the crew refusing to work. Misclassification risk doesn't always arrive as a lawsuit with a case number. Sometimes it arrives as a production shutdown, a union campaign, and a news cycle, while the cameras are supposed to be rolling.

"The production is temporary" is the most common justification we hear for putting crews on 1099s. It's also irrelevant. Duration isn't the test. A six-week shoot with call sheets, a set hierarchy, and company equipment looks like employment for those six weeks.

The split decision every platform should read

The most legally important case on this list is the least famous. In Tomasello v. ICF Technology, decided in May 2026, a New Jersey federal court ruled on claims by performers who livestream on the company's platform. Their contracts called them independent contractors, and they genuinely controlled a lot: their schedules, their content, their pricing, their location, even their right to use competing platforms.

The court split the result. Under the federal FLSA test, the performers were independent contractors. Under New Jersey's ABC test, they were employees because the service they provided is the core service the platform sells. A parallel case against the same companies in Connecticut was certified as a class action in March 2026.

Sit with that for a second. Same workers, same facts: contractors under one legal framework, employees under another. If you engage creators, editors, moderators, or performers across state lines, you don't have one classification question. You have one per state, and the strictest test decides the claims it hears.

What's next on the docket

The pipeline isn't slowing down. In July 2026, ten video and photo editors sued ShowLabs, a high-volume content studio, over amounts allegedly unpaid under their independent contractor agreements and the specialist firms that track misclassification litigation have already logged the case in that category. And in 2025, a New Jersey appellate court upheld a state finding that a DJ services company owed $45,000 in unpaid unemployment and disability contributions for DJs misclassified as contractors. No class action, no headlines, just a routine audit of a small events company.

That last one may be the most instructive item on this list. You don't need to be Netflix to be worth an agency's time.

The pattern under all of it

Strip out the industry details and every one of these matters turns on the same three questions:

• Who controls the work? Schedules, venues, scripts, training, policies, discipline. The more of these you set, the more the relationship looks like employment, whatever the contract says.
• Is the work your business? Performers at a performance company, crew on a production, editors at a content studio. When the worker provides the thing you sell, ABC-test states will presume employment.
• Does the paperwork match the behavior? Agencies and courts don't read your IC agreement and stop. They look at how the relationship actually operated. The contract loses that fight every time the facts disagree with it.

If this is your workforce

None of this means entertainment and new media companies should stop using project-based talent. Project work is how the industry functions. What these cases attack is the assumption that project-based automatically means 1099.

If a role fails the test, the answer is W-2 and that's less painful than it sounds. You don't have to open payroll tax accounts in every state you shoot in, and you don't have to turn a six-week engagement into a permanent hire. That's what an employer of record is for: we become the legal employer, run payroll with overtime and meal-and-rest compliance in the right state, carry workers' comp, and the engagement stays as project-shaped as the work.

We do this every day for production, media, and new media companies as part of our EOR work. If some of the arrangements above sound uncomfortably familiar, the time to look is before the demand letter. Talk to us.