Those Across The Paramount-Warner Bros. Deal Aren’t Considering The Impact On The Independent Business — Guest Column

Editor’s note: AGC CEO and chairman Stuart Ford, a veteran of the independent film scene, trained as a lawyer before working for Miramax and then running IM Global and AGC, which has a busy slate of film and TV projects. Here, he considers how the independent business could be impacted by the Paramount-WBD deal and how the indie sector is conspicuous in its absence from the AG’s antitrust complaint.

For anyone who hasn’t read the states’ entire antitrust complaint against the Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery merger closely — HHI calculations, box office concentration ratios – I can tell you there’s important insight into what happens to a theater chain or a cable distributor when the number of people they negotiate with drops from five to four. What it doesn’t seek to do is confront any of the systemic issues that are hampering the industry’s vital organs of independent film and international television. That’s as big a worry as it is a missed opportunity.

What I will say is this: I read all 38 pages looking for my own sectors — independent film and international television production — and found mostly their absence. Specifically, I found the absence of the risk-takers, the people and companies who put creative and financial capital on the line to get something made before any of the bigger corporations are willing or able to. For both solid policy and bona fide commercial reasons, I’m arguing that any path forward must do a better job than the antitrust lawyers have done so far at encouraging investment in these vital organs within the entertainment ecosystem.

Let’s talk specifics. The complaint is built around theater chains and streaming and cable distributors. Independent film barely registers as a category worth naming, let alone protecting. International television doesn’t appear at all. That’s not a knock on the lawyers who wrote it — they built the case they think will win. But a shrinking circle of major buyers does real damage to independent film and international television. That damage runs on two tracks that reinforce each other.

Track one is economic and structural. Right now, the biggest drag on these key sectors is the steady erosion of Pay-1 license fees for films and the collapse of independent television sellers’ negotiating leverage with U.S. streamers. Pay-1 — the deal that lets a streamer air a film after its theatrical window — used to be a reliable revenue line. It helped independent financiers underwrite risk up front, and independent distributors could price it into their economics. Fewer studios invariably means weaker Pay-1 arrangements. Internationally, the problem compounds: fewer major U.S. feature buyers means fewer of the validation signals that overseas broadcasters use to convince local exhibitors a project is worth backing. This chills the foreign presale market and the capital it generates. In television, the issue is an even simpler case of diminishing licensing appetite from U.S. streamers. This has triggered lower minimum guarantees from overseas distributors who in the past have been structurally key to deficit financing shows. So on the film and television fronts, less leverage, less revenue, less capital — a straightforward economic squeeze.

Track two is creative, and it’s just as corrosive. Independent film and international television production are, at their best, the industry’s most vibrant forums for bold voices and genuinely original, authentic stories — stories made because they’re exciting, not because they fit a franchise slate. Christopher Nolan couldn’t get near a

studio until he’d shot Following for a few thousand pounds. International television is structurally similar to independent film, with projects typically being co-productions anchored by one or two commissioning overseas broadcasters alongside a deficit-financing distributor willing to be a financial counterparty. Phoebe Waller-Bridge was writing Fleabag for BBC Three before she was rewriting a Bond film. Take away that structure, and you take away the on-ramp that built those careers.

Here’s why both tracks matter not just to companies like mine, but to the very company this merger would create. A huge amount of “studio content” is developed and packaged by independent producers and financiers before a studio or streamer ever writes a check. Independent producers often find the book, attach the director, and build the financing plan, and only then does the project arrive looking viable and de-risked. There’s also the small circle of companies such as my own that prolifically commit mid-to-high eight-figure sums to fund film and television productions. By squeezing our economics and starving our ability to discover and back bold voices, the majors and streamers aren’t just hurting the independents — they’re throttling their own supply chain, shrinking the number of places where the next hit can be found and brought to their desks.

There’s an obvious beneficiary, and it isn’t another studio. Every time Hollywood lets independent film and international television wither as a forum for outside investment and new talent cultivation, it hands the development of that talent, and the audiences that follow it, straight to YouTube and TikTok. These platforms are more than happy to be the farm system the industry no longer wants to fund.

Here’s the good news. Audiences — younger ones especially — are palpably hungry for the authentic storytelling that independent and overseas markets so reliably produce, even in a landscape increasingly crowded with algorithmic feeds and AI slop. So as our studio environment continues to change, there must be strategic planning to empower the independent film and television systems. Hollywood wants to continue reaching audiences around the world and across generations. It can only do so if independent risk-takers are creatively and financially incentivized to stay in the system.