Though it has but to turn out to be front-page information within the UK, you ought to know concerning the proposed Paramount-Warner Bros merger. It threatens to inflict immense hurt on the British public. As actors and public figures who’ve spent our careers within the arts in Britain – working with British crews, on British phases and units – we have now a duty to the general public who help, get pleasure from and devour the artwork we make.
The UK is being threatened by a media merger that would hurt our employees, our tradition and the general public – however we are able to stop it. We are inspired by Lisa Nandy, the secretary of state for digital, tradition, media and sport, who just lately despatched letters to Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros Discovery, in addition to an announcement to parliament, indicating that she is “minded to intervene” in Paramount’s $110bn takeover of Warner Bros.
She is right to examine this main menace to the UK’s public curiosity. And she is not going to be performing alone. This month, 12 US states, led by California, sued in federal court to block the merger, warning that it could increase costs, shrink the variety of movies made and degrade the standard of what audiences see. And they only received a serious victory: on Friday, Paramount agreed to delay the merger till trial, which could be months. These states acted even after Washington’s personal justice division – regardless of the reported reservations of profession workers – waved the deal through.
Their lawsuit confirms the hazard; it can’t, nevertheless, do the UK’s work for it. US courts combat on the antitrust entrance for US markets. The EU, which final week conditionally backed the merger, additionally makes its personal choices. The UK’s public curiosity, our public service broadcasting, our information plurality, the plurality of voices British audiences hear, can solely be defended right here, by our personal secretary of state and the Competition and Markets Authority.
The combat towards this merger now runs on two fronts, and Nandy instructions one in every of them. Should her division determine to intervene, it could show one of the vital essential choices any tradition secretary has taken for UK movie, tv and media in a era.
This is why. We have spent our lives working on this trade. We know what it appears to be like like from the within: the sound phases at Leavesden, the crews who transfer from manufacturing to manufacturing, the editors and digital camera operators and costume designers whose names scroll previous within the credit on the finish of a movie. These are our cherished buddies and colleagues, who create the exhibits all of us love, who produce the information that educates the general public and movie the game occasions we get pleasure from collectively. UK movie and tv aren’t simply photographs in your screens; they’re the lives and livelihoods of hundreds of employees and households, whose work helps native economies. The trade helps more than 180,000 jobs, generated £6.8bn in production spend final 12 months alone and provides roughly £12bn a year in worth to our financial system. It is without doubt one of the issues the UK nonetheless does higher than nearly anybody, and a cultural heritage we should defend.
We have watched, with rising alarm, what consolidation does to the breadth and depth of the work we produce: unbiased movie acquisitions on the main unbiased movie pageant Sundance fell by half between 2019 and 2025. Award-winning documentaries – movies that won Oscars and topped festival juries – have struggled to find commercial distribution as a result of they touched topics the remaining handful of consumers discovered inconvenient. Every merger of this type narrows the funnel by way of which tales can attain audiences.
That is exactly what makes the Paramount-WBD merger so harmful. It’s why the intervention of Nandy and her division issues a lot.
Paramount proposes to swallow Warner Bros Discovery in one of many largest leveraged buyouts ever tried, loading the mixed firm with an estimated $84bn in debt. To service it, executives have promised traders round $6bn in “synergies”. In plain English, that means redundancies, cancelled productions, fewer movies commissioned and fewer dangers taken.
We have seen this earlier than. When Discovery merged with WarnerMedia in 2022, it shelved completed movies and cut thousands of jobs; when Skydance merged with Paramount final 12 months, it laid off about 2,000 people. Now the identical executives are making the identical promise, and UK crews, producers, expertise and audiences pays when the invoice comes due.
But jobs are largely a matter for the Competition and Markets Authority, whose review ought to finish in a full section 2 investigation. The job of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport goes additional: to decide whether or not the merger is within the public curiosity. It most actually shouldn’t be. In her statement to British MPs, Nandy cited the necessity for a ample plurality of views in information media and a ample plurality of people controlling media enterprises. She has additionally highlighted the potential impression on streaming providers, content material homogenisation and youngsters’s tv. The Enterprise Act protects one thing we should always all care about: who decides what we get to watch, and what we get to know.
Consider the breadth of what this single firm would maintain. Channel 5, one in every of our 5 public service broadcasters, which serves the night information to individuals with out the price of a subscription. CNN International, which Ofcom research in 2018 found UK viewers rated above each different TV information supply for high quality, accuracy, trustworthiness and impartiality. The CNN and CBS information archives – among the many world’s most essential broadcast information collections, with more than 4.25m movies, photographs and media spanning practically half a century of historical past. If one commercially proprietor controls entry to each, they management the uncooked materials of our historic reminiscence.
One proprietor controlling this a lot of the information, and the reality, endangers the general public in a manner no peculiar consolidation does. When separate house owners run separate newsrooms, a narrative judged inconvenient by one can nonetheless attain audiences by way of one other. Fold these newsrooms right into a single firm, and one boardroom’s business anxieties – or political money owed – decide what tens of millions of individuals see and what they by no means study existed.
And we all know one thing about this explicit proprietor’s intentions. Paramount’s chief govt reportedly informed Donald Trump that he would make “sweeping changes” to CNN if the deal went by way of. When the client of the world’s most trusted worldwide information channel makes editorial guarantees to a politician, a British secretary of state is entitled – and, actually, obliged – to ask questions earlier than the ink dries.
Nandy has been scrupulous in noting that no remaining choice has been taken. Good. It is essential to take the time to get this proper. But the case for a full public curiosity intervention, with Ofcom assessing plurality and reporting again, is overwhelming.
Actors are sometimes informed to keep out of authorized arguments. We perceive the intuition. But we have now spent our lives on sufficient UK units, labored alongside sufficient UK crews and watched sufficient good work from the UK wrestle to discover a purchaser to know that this isn’t another person’s argument. It is ours. Nandy has opened the door to intervention. She should stroll by way of it, for the sake of everybody who makes UK tv and movie – and everybody who watches it. If she doesn’t, we’ll be left with out the flexibility to defend our trade and our tradition from this consolidation. We should not push the general public’s curiosity apart; we should get up for it and block this merger.
