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Opinion
Television
industry
A TV and
cinema calamity could be disastrous for what you watch and what you know. Act
now to stop that
Benedict
Cumberbatch, Alan Cumming and Benedict Wong
The
Paramount-Warner Bros merger is being fought in the US and UK. Britain’s
culture secretary knows the risks and can intervene. She should
Mon 27
Jul 2026 06.00 BST
Though it
has yet to become front-page news in the UK, you should know about the proposed
Paramount-Warner Bros merger. It threatens to inflict immense harm on the
British public. As actors and public figures who have spent our careers in the
arts in Britain – working with British crews, on British stages and sets – we
have a responsibility to the public who support, enjoy and consume the art we
make.
The UK is
being threatened by a media merger that would harm our workers, our culture and
the public – but we can stop it. We are encouraged by Lisa Nandy, the secretary
of state for digital, culture, media and sport, who recently sent letters to
Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros Discovery, as well as a statement to
parliament, indicating that she is “minded to intervene” in Paramount’s $110bn
takeover of Warner Bros.
She is
correct to investigate this major threat to the UK’s public interest. And she
will not be acting alone. This month, 12 US states, led by California, sued in
federal court to block the merger, warning that it would raise prices, shrink
the number of films made and degrade the quality of what audiences see. And
they just won a major victory: on Friday, Paramount agreed to delay the merger
until trial, which could be months. These states acted even after Washington’s
own justice department – despite the reported reservations of career staff –
waved the deal through.
Their
lawsuit confirms the danger; it cannot, however, do the UK’s work for it. US
courts fight on the antitrust front for US markets. The EU, which last week
conditionally backed the merger, also makes its own decisions. The UK’s public
interest, our public service broadcasting, our news plurality, the plurality of
voices British audiences hear, can only be defended here, by our own secretary
of state and the Competition and Markets Authority.
The fight
against this merger now runs on two fronts, and Nandy commands one of them.
Should her department decide to intervene, it may prove one of the most
important decisions any culture secretary has taken for UK film, television and
media in a generation.
This is
why. We have spent our lives working in this industry. We know what it looks
like from the inside: the sound stages at Leavesden, the crews who move from
production to production, the editors and camera operators and costume
designers whose names scroll past in the credits at the end of a film. These
are our cherished friends and colleagues, who create the shows we all love, who
produce the news that educates the public and film the sport events we enjoy
together. UK film and television are not just images on your screens; they are
the lives and livelihoods of thousands of workers and families, whose work
supports local economies. The industry supports more than 180,000 jobs,
generated £6.8bn in production spend last year alone and adds roughly £12bn a
year in value to our economy. It is one of the things the UK still does better
than almost anyone, and a cultural heritage we must protect.
We have
watched, with growing alarm, what consolidation does to the breadth and depth
of the work we produce: independent film acquisitions at the leading
independent film festival Sundance fell by half between 2019 and 2025.
Award-winning documentaries – films that won Oscars and topped festival juries
– have struggled to find commercial distribution because they touched subjects
the remaining handful of buyers found inconvenient. Every merger of this kind
narrows the funnel through which stories can reach audiences.
That is
precisely what makes the Paramount-WBD merger so dangerous. It’s why the
intervention of Nandy and her department matters so much.
Paramount
proposes to swallow Warner Bros Discovery in one of the largest leveraged
buyouts ever attempted, loading the combined company with an estimated $84bn in
debt. To service it, executives have promised investors around $6bn in
“synergies”. In plain English, that means redundancies, cancelled productions,
fewer films commissioned and fewer risks taken.
We have
seen this before. When Discovery merged with WarnerMedia in 2022, it shelved
finished films and cut thousands of jobs; when Skydance merged with Paramount
last year, it laid off about 2,000 people. Now the same executives are making
the same promise, and UK crews, producers, talent and audiences will pay when
the bill comes due.
But jobs
are mostly a matter for the Competition and Markets Authority, whose review
should end in a full phase 2 investigation. The job of the Department for
Culture, Media and Sport goes further: to determine whether the merger is in
the public interest. It most certainly is not. In her statement to British MPs,
Nandy cited the need for a sufficient plurality of views in news media and a
sufficient plurality of individuals controlling media enterprises. She has also
highlighted the potential impact on streaming services, content homogenisation
and children’s television. The Enterprise Act protects something we should all
care about: who decides what we get to watch, and what we get to know.
Consider
the breadth of what this single company would hold. Channel 5, one of our five
public service broadcasters, which serves the evening news to people without
the cost of a subscription. CNN International, which Ofcom research in 2018
found UK viewers rated above every other TV news source for quality, accuracy,
trustworthiness and impartiality. The CNN and CBS news archives – among the
world’s most important broadcast news collections, with more than 4.25m videos,
images and media spanning nearly half a century of history. If one commercially
interested owner controls access to both, they control the raw material of our
historical memory.
One owner
controlling this much of the news, and the truth, endangers the public in a way
no ordinary consolidation does. When separate owners run separate newsrooms, a
story judged inconvenient by one can still reach audiences through another.
Fold those newsrooms into a single company, and one boardroom’s commercial
anxieties – or political debts – determine what millions of people see and what
they never learn existed.
And we
know something about this particular proprietor’s intentions. Paramount’s chief
executive reportedly told Donald Trump that he would make “sweeping changes” to
CNN if the deal went through. When the buyer of the world’s most trusted
international news channel makes editorial promises to a politician, a British
secretary of state is entitled – and, really, obliged – to ask questions before
the ink dries.
Nandy has
been scrupulous in noting that no final decision has been taken. Good. It is
important to take the time to get this right. But the case for a full public
interest intervention, with Ofcom assessing plurality and reporting back, is
overwhelming.
Actors
are often told to stay out of legal arguments. We understand the instinct. But
we have spent our lives on enough UK sets, worked alongside enough UK crews and
watched enough brilliant work from the UK struggle to find a buyer to know that
this is not someone else’s argument. It is ours. Nandy has opened the door to
intervention. She must walk through it, for the sake of everyone who makes UK
television and film – and everyone who watches it. If she does not, we will be
left without the ability to protect our industry and our culture from this
consolidation. We must not push the public’s interest aside; we must stand up
for it and block this merger.
Alan
Cumming, Benedict Cumberbatch and Benedict Wong are actors working in the UK
and Hollywood
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