The Alan Cumming-backed Block the Merger coalition has submitted evidence to the UK Culture Secretary over why the Paramount-Warner mega-merger should be blocked.
Four of the groups that make up the coalition said they provided Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy with “market data and first-hand professional evidence as she determines whether to intervene.”
UK parliament is now in recess for the summer and Nandy, who has already said she is “minded to intervene,” will not deliver her decision until September 1 at the earliest. Since the recess, the $110B merger has slammed the brakes in the U.S. after 12 States sued.
The Block the Merger organizations, which are the Archival Producers Alliance, the International Documentary Association, the UK’s Documentary Film Council and Democracy Defenders Fund, complained WarnerMount would become the third largest linear broadcaster in the UK before HBO Max’s “rapid growth” is even taken into account.
They also put forward the argument that for the first time the CNN and CBS News archives, two of America’s most historically significant broadcast news archives, will be under a single owner, “directly impacting UK documentarians’ ability to tell diverse stories.”
“As the coalition has made clear, this merger is not a done deal, and filmmakers, journalists, archive producers, unions, and consumer advocates on both sides of the Atlantic will keep working to make sure it never is,” the organizations said.
The news comes two weeks after The Traitors host Cumming posted a vid backing Block the Merger in which he said WarnerMount would “all [be] answering to a giant conglomerate beholden to Donald Trump, autocrats and oligarchs.”
A few days later he co-authored an op-ed with Benedict Cumberbatch describing the deal as a “calamity.”
The UK opposition to the deal has been vehement as both American congloms have a far-reaching footprint, including linear network 5 (previously Channel 5) and numerous production outfits. The European Union gave the merger the greenlight last week.
