October 2026 |
Nostradamus Perspectives
By Hillevi Gustafson
All You Need is Merge (?)
The merger of Paramount and Warner Brothers is finally complete and the whole industry is trying to figure out what this means for the business going forward. Meanwhile, a wave of consolidation is also sweeping Europe with the merger of Banijay and All3Media closing in July and Sky expected to take over ITV in the UK in the near future. So let’s dig into what all this consolidation could mean for the industry and some developments that buck the trend.
Almost a year after Warner Brothers went up for sale the deal finally closed earlier this month. We will not get into all the minutiae of the deal now, there are some excellent summaries here and here if you want to brush up on the details. And while the Paramount-WB deal has been getting a lot of attention, there has also been an avalanche of consolidation across Europe.
There is a general sense that for both European broadcasters and production companies the only way forward is to get bigger. In Germany RTL acquired Sky Deutschland back in June, folding it into their RTL+ streaming service which is now the third largest streamer in German-speaking Europe. Banijay and All3Media merged this summer and are now the world’s largest independent TV production group. According to Variety “The combined firm is home to 170-plus production labels that deliver 19,000 hours of content a year. The company actively produces 45 formats and it introduces more than 315 unscripted shows a year. Historically, both Banijay and All3 have been known for unscripted content, but the company produces no less than 1,800 hours of scripted content a year with 140-plus titles launched each year.” This is just to name a couple of the deals made in the last couple years.
The proposed merger of Sky and ITV in the UK is still not closed and the government is considering intervening. The culture secretary, Lisa Nandy, has voiced concerns regarding ““public interest considerations” including “the need for free expression of opinion in news media,” “the need for a sufficient plurality of views in news media in each market” and “the need for the availability throughout the United Kingdom of a wide range of broadcasting, on-demand programmes or both.” () She mentioned similar concerns regarding the Paramount-Warner deal but that did not prevent the merger from being passed. Sky and ITV had until October 20th to respond but so far now further announcements have been made.
There are of course drawbacks with this concentration of the entertainment industry. Wariness to this era of consolidation was expressed by several interviewees in this year’s Nostradamus Report. Peter Carlton, co-owner of Warp Films, predicted that the coming years will be quite bleak for independent producers and Irina Ignatiew-Lemke, managing director at European Film Promotion, pointed out that the decrease in number of potential buyers for each project can already be felt.
Consolidating decision-making power in the hands of very few companies and individuals is a challenge for democracy and the plurality of voices that get platformed. No need to rehash it, but the Macklemore-Ed Sheeran-Robert Kraft situation comes to mind.
But, there are also recent developments that defy the times.
In Europe an alliance of independent producers from several countries, The Creatives, is aiming to gain scale without losing their independence. The alliance has just been formalized into a jointly owned holding company with seventeen producer-founders who will continue to retain power of creative decisions. This is the first venture of its kind in Europe and Romain Bessi, CEO of the group, told Deadline that “It’s really about gaining scale but not giving up autonomy.”
In the US, the newly formed American Entertainment Alliance is pushing for legislation that protect independent producers. The three major talent agencies, CAA, WME, and UTA, have joined forces with prominent producers like Ron Howard, Jason Blum, and Brian Grazer to get congress to introduce a bill. The demand is that streams could spend half their original-content budgets on independent US productions and that licensing and syndications rights should revert to producers after a few years. () This of course mirrors legislation that already exists in the EU under the Audiovisual Media Services Directive. It will remain to be seen if they manage to turn the campaign into legislation, but the federal government is already looking at passing a new production tax incentive so perhaps there is momentum to be used.