Every studio merger is also a merger of memory. When two libraries the size of Paramount’s and Warner Bros. Discovery’s collapse onto a single balance sheet, the footage of the last century — newsreels, raw interviews, unaired tape, the offcuts that historians and documentary makers actually build with — stops being a shared resource and becomes one owner’s asset. That is the quiet stake in the deal that has Hollywood’s executives talking quarterly earnings and its archivists talking about loss.

Speaking at the Bentonville Film Festival, archival producer Rochelle Widdowson put the worry plainly. “It’s heartbreaking,” she told Deadline, calling it “really, really sad that there are a handful of people who are controlling these.” Widdowson, an Australian-born producer now working out of New York, is no abstract worrier: her recent documentary Ghost in the Machine, Valerie Veatch’s film tracing artificial intelligence back to the eugenics movement, was stitched together from more than 900 archival pieces pulled from institutions like PBS, the BBC and the stock house Pond5.

Her alarm is specific. Skydance Media, through its takeover of Paramount, already controls the CBS News archive; should Paramount succeed in absorbing Warner Bros. Discovery, CNN’s archive would pass into the same hands. A century of news footage and a vast film and television library would answer to one corporate gatekeeper — and, Widdowson warns, what gets pulled offline rarely comes back. “We can’t just magically make the archives reappear if they’re taken offline,” she said.

The threat she describes is not only consolidation but disappearance. Some rights holders have already begun yanking collections off the open internet to keep AI companies from harvesting them as training data — a defensive move that also walls the same material off from the documentary makers who depend on it. For Widdowson the cost is civic, not merely professional. “If we don’t have a way to verify our history, it’s really hard to see where we’re going,” she said.

She is not alone. The Archival Producers Alliance, founded in 2023 and now more than 650 members strong, has spent the past year arguing against the deal; its founders Stephanie Jenkins, Rachel Antell and Jennifer Petrucelli have laid out the case in the Los Angeles Times and, this month, in the Poynter Institute, framing archival access and AI exploitation as two faces of the same consolidation — the consolidation that drew Jane Fonda onto a New York stage against the merger only days earlier.

The figures in a merger filing are reversible; an archive is not. Lose the only print, wipe the only master, let a server quietly go dark, and the magic Widdowson says doesn’t exist is precisely what it would take to bring it back.

Tags: media-consolidation, Paramount, Warner Bros. Discovery, Archival Producers Alliance, film preservation, Rochelle Widdowson

Archivists warn a Paramount-Warner merger would put film history in a handful of hands

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