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
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.
