Business
In Britain, a Fight Over a Film Studio Becomes a Test for the Economy
Andrew Rackstraw has lived in Marlow, a small, wealthy town on the River Thames about 30 miles west of London, for nearly three decades. Its main streets are dotted with luxury boutiques, high-end cafes and stores like Saddle Safari, Mr. Rackstraw’s bike shop.
With a population of about 14,000, Marlow also has a plush cinema and a rowing club that dates to the 19th century. Around the corner from Mr. Rackstraw’s shop is a Michelin-starred restaurant. Farther down the road is Britain’s only two-Michelin-starred pub.
It is the picture of an idyllic English town.
But there is a threat, as locals see it, to Marlow’s quiet charm: a proposal to build a 750-million-pound ($950 million) film and TV studio complex. Plans include 18 soundstages, workshop space, offices and outdoor filming lots across 90 acres between Marlow and the smaller village of Little Marlow.
For more than three years, many Marlow residents have opposed the project, dubious of the developers’ promises that it will bring thousands of jobs, including creative roles, and more business for the town’s economy. “It will have the biggest impact to Marlow that we’ve ever seen because of the scale of it,” Mr. Rackstraw said on a recent morning inside his store.
In the past few months, the battle over this studio has taken on national significance as a marker of how far the British government will go to use development as a means to revive the nation’s stagnant economy. But the proposed film studio is not crucial infrastructure or needed housing, unlike much of the other development the government has vowed to speed up.
Marlow is “already choked with traffic,” Mr. Rackstraw said. The studio would bring thousands more cars, he added, and the town would “lose the very element that draws people to Marlow — the fact that it isn’t spoiled like so many other towns.”
Opponents seemed to be victorious last May when the local council rejected the planning application. But just a few months later, a new government, led by the Labour Party, breathed new life into the studio plans.
Britain’s creative industries, including film and TV production, have been designated a central part of the government’s economic growth agenda. These industries have long been a major cultural and economic force for the country, stretching back to the early 1900s. Alfred Hitchcock helped shape the thriller genre in the 1930s in Britain. But the country also became a top destination for international productions, particularly since the 1970s when “Star Wars” filmed just outside London. More recently, blockbusters like “Wicked” and “Barbie” were filmed here. It’s the largest production hub for Netflix outside North America.
The Labour government has said economic growth is its No. 1 mission, but since the party came to power last summer, growth has been mostly elusive. Hampered by strained public finances, the government is depending on changes to the nation’s planning system as a crucial lever in generating growth. Ministers have proclaimed that they will “back the builders, not the blockers” to revitalize Britain’s economy.
The developers behind the project, led by Robert Laycock, the chief executive of the would-be Marlow Film Studios, appealed the council’s decision in September. A month later, Angela Rayner, the deputy prime minister and secretary of state for housing, communities and local government, stepped in and said she would decide whether to grant approval, a relatively rare intervention.
“There’s a growing consensus across the U.K. that the planning system is too restrictive and that this is causing problems,” said Anthony Breach, a researcher for Centre for Cities. “It’s too difficult to build, it’s too uncertain, it’s too judicial.”
But the Labour Party has started to loosen the rules, and there has been a “change in mood music,” he added.
Last month, the government said it supported adding a third runway to Heathrow Airport, potentially drawing an end to a two-decade debate on the subject. Ministers have also made it easier to build more houses around commuter rail stations and to speed up decisions on big infrastructure projects such as nuclear plants and wind farms. “The answer can’t always be no,” Rachel Reeves, the chancellor of the Exchequer, said recently.
The future of the Marlow film studio is in limbo. A planning inspector overseeing a five-week public inquiry, which ends Monday, will make a recommendation to Ms. Rayner. Another studio project, just seven miles from Marlow, is also hoping for Ms. Rayner’s approval to overturn a rejected application.
Mr. Laycock chose the land he wanted to build on about a decade ago. “It’s really tough to do anything in this country,” he said. But he said he was enthusiastic about the government’s changes to “get us out of this rut” of not wanting to do ambitious projects.
Most of the development would be on fields of thistles near several lakes where red kites fly overhead. But the complex would also nearly envelop a small area of housing, which includes more than 50 mobile homes where many retirees live and an early-18th-century house converted into apartments.
Thorsten Polleit, an economist who lives in one of the converted apartments, testified in the inquiry that residents would be “totally surrounded, literally incarcerated” by the development.
Among the reasons the Marlow studio has been contested is that it is proposed on a so-called green belt, which is land protected from development to stop urban sprawl. Green belt makes up 13 percent of England’s land.
The government is planning to reclassify some of the poor-quality parts of the green belt as “gray belt” and thus open it up to development, a change that has been mostly welcomed because it could accommodate more housing where people most want to live and work.
The plans for the Marlow studio also come after a boom in studio building in Britain. In the past five years, studio space has doubled to about six million square feet as developers and local authorities have capitalized on interest from American streaming giants including Netflix, Disney+ and Amazon Prime and British government support for the sector.
But the production industry was hurt by the Hollywood strikes in 2023, because most of the spending comes from the United States. And the big streamers have also spent less on content in recent years. Last year, the industry started to recover, with £5.6 billion spent in Britain on film and high-end TV production, 86 percent of which came from abroad. That was 31 percent more than in 2023, but did not return to the highs of 2021 and 2022.
“2024 was a transition year from the worst parts of the strikes,” said Adrian Wootton, the chief executive of the British Film Commission. He’s feeling “cautiously optimistic” about this year as filming picks up again, including for “Star Wars” TV shows and Season 4 of “Bridgerton,” and the benefits of enhanced tax relief measures introduced last year.
The commission has supported the expansion of studio space, including projects still in development such as the one in Marlow, but is not “banging the drum saying we need even more than that,” Mr. Wootton said.
Despite the hurdles, Mr. Laycock, the Marlow Film Studios chief executive, is committed to having the studio near Marlow. It’s the “right and only” location, he said, in part, because it is less than 10 miles away from Pinewood Studios, where many of the James Bond movies were filmed. Mr. Laycock is a great-nephew of Ian Fleming, the author of the Bond books, a connection he emphasizes amid accusations that he and his team do not have enough experience in the film industry.
“Nobody is denying that the planning system needs reform,” said Anna Crabtree, a parish councilor for Little Marlow, the village bordering the studio. But, she argues, one of the problems is that the system is biased toward people with money who can push forward “unrealistic proposals that local people know are not going to work.”
The battle has been “a huge drain on the local community,” she said. “It’s really stressful for local people.”
The sale of Warner Bros. — whether in pieces to Netflix or in its entirety to Paramount — is stirring mounting worries among Hollywood union leaders about the possible fallout for their members.
Unions representing writers, directors, actors and crew workers have voiced growing concerns that further consolidation in the media industry will reduce competition, potentially causing studios to pay less for content, and make it more difficult for people to find work.
“We’ve seen this movie before, and we know how it ends,” said Michele Mulroney, president of the Writers Guild of America West. “There are lots of promises made that one plus one is going to equal three. But it’s very hard to envision how two behemoths, for example, Warner Bros. and Netflix … can keep up the level of output they currently have.”
Last week, Netflix announced it agreed to buy Warner Bros. Discovery’s film and TV studio, Burbank lot, HBO and HBO Max for $27.75 a share, or $72 billion. It also agreed to take on more than $10 billion of Warner Bros.’ debt. But Paramount, whose previous offers were rebuffed by Warner Bros., has appealed directly to shareholders with an alternative bid to buy all of the company for about $78 billion.
Paramount said it will have more than $6 billion in cuts over three years, while also saying the combined companies will release at least 30 movies a year. Netflix said it expects its deal will have $2 billion to $3 billion in cost cuts.
Those cuts are expected to trigger thousands of layoffs across Hollywood, which has already been squeezed by the flight of production overseas and a contraction in the once booming TV business.
Mulroney said that employment for WGA writers in episodic television is down as much as 40% when comparing the 2023-2024 writing season to 2022-2023.
Executives from both companies have said their deals would benefit creative talent and consumers.
But Hollywood union leaders are skeptical.
“We can hear the generalizations all day long, but it doesn’t really mean anything unless it’s on paper, and we just don’t know if these companies are even prepared to make promises in writing,” said Lindsay Dougherty, Teamsters at-large vice president and principal officer for Local 399, which represents drivers, location managers and casting directors.
Dougherty said the Teamsters have been engaged with both Netflix and Paramount, seeking commitments to keep filming in Los Angeles.
“We have a lot of members that are struggling to find work, or haven’t really worked in the last year or so,” Dougherty said.
Mulroney said her union has concerns about both bids, either by Netflix or Paramount.
“We don’t think the merger is inevitable,” Mulroney said. “We think there’s an opportunity to push back here.”
If Netflix were to buy Warner Bros.’ TV and film businesses, Mulroney said that could further undermine the theatrical business.
“It’s hard to imagine them fully embracing theatrical exhibition,” Mulroney said. “The exhibition business has been struggling to get back on its feet ever since the pandemic, so a move like this could really be existential.”
But the Writers Guild also has issues with Paramount’s bid, Mulroney said, noting that it would put Paramount-owned CBS News and CNN under the same parent company.
“We have censorship concerns,” Mulroney said. “We saw issues around [Stephen] Colbert and [Jimmy] Kimmel. We’re concerned about what the news would look like under single ownership here.”
That question was made more salient this week after President Trump, who has for years harshly criticized CNN’s hosts and news coverage, said he believes CNN should be sold.
The worries come as some unions’ major studio contracts, including the DGA, WGA and performers guild SAG-AFTRA, are set to expire next year. Two years ago, writers and actors went on a prolonged strike to push for more AI protections and better wages and benefits.
The Directors Guild of America and performers union SAG-AFTRA have voiced similar objections to the pending media consolidation.
“A deal that is in the interest of SAG-AFTRA members and all other workers in the entertainment industry must result in more creation and more production, not less,” the union said.
SAG-AFTRA National Executive Director Duncan Crabtree-Ireland said the union has been in discussions with both Paramount and Netflix.
“It is as yet unclear what path forward is going to best protect the legacy that Warner Brothers presents, and that’s something that we’re very actively investigating right now,” he said.
It’s not clear, however, how much influence the unions will have in the outcome.
“They just don’t have a seat at the ultimate decision making table,” said David Smith, a professor of economics at the Pepperdine Graziadio Business School. “I expect their primary involvement could be through creating more awareness of potential challenges with a merger and potentially more regulatory scrutiny … I think that’s what they’re attempting to do.”
Businessman Brian Kahn has pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit securities fraud in a case that brought down a hedge fund, helped lead to the bankruptcy of a retailer and damaged West Los Angeles investment bank B. Riley Financial.
Kahn, 52, admitted in a Trenton, N.J., federal court Wednesday to hiding trading losses that brought down Prophecy Asset Management in 2020. The Securities and Exchange Commission alleged the losses exceeded $400 million.
An investor lawsuit has accused Kahn of funneling some of the fund’s money to Franchise Group, a Delaware retail holding company assembled by the investor that owned Vitamin Shoppe, Pet Supplies Plus and other chains.
B. Riley provided $600 million through debt it raised to finance a $2.8-billion management buyout led by Kahn in 2023. It also took a 31% stake in the company and lent Kahn’s investment fund $201 million, largely secured with shares of Franchise Group.
Kahn had done deals with B. Riley co-founder Bryant Riley before partnering with the L.A. businessman on Franchise Group.
However, the buyout didn’t work out amid fallout from the hedge fund scandal and slowing sales at the retailers. Franchise Group filed for bankruptcy in November 2024. A slimmed-down version of the company emerged from Chapter 11 in June.
B. Riley has disclosed in regulatory filings that the firm and Riley have received SEC subpoenas regarding its dealings with Kahn, Franchise group and other matters.
Riley, 58, the firm’s chairman and co-chief executive, has denied knowledge of wrongdoing, and an outside law firm reached the same conclusion.
The failed deal led to huge losses at the financial services firm that pummeled B. Riley’s stock, which had approached $90 in 2021. Shares were trading Friday at $3.98.
The company has marked down its Franchise Group investment, and has spent the last year or so paring debt through refinancing, selling off parts of its business and other steps, including closing offices.
The company announced last month it is changing its name to BRC Group Holdings in January. It did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
At Wednesday’s plea hearing, Assistant U.S. Atty. Kelly Lyons said that Kahn conspired to “defraud dozens of investors who had invested approximately $360 million” through “lies, deception, misleading statements and material omissions.”
U.S. District Judge Michael Shipp released Kahn on a $100,000 bond and set an April 2 sentencing date. He faces up to five years in prison. Kahn, his lawyer and Lyons declined to comment after the hearing.
Kahn is the third Prophecy official charged over the hedge fund’s collapse. Two other executives, John Hughes and Jeffrey Spotts, have also been charged.
Hughes pleaded guilty and is cooperating with prosecutors. Spotts pleaded not guilty and faces trial next year. The two men and Kahn also have been sued by the SEC over the Prophecy collapse.
Bloomberg News contributed to this report.
Chatty bots are sharing their hot takes through hundreds of thousands of AI-generated podcasts. And the invasion has just begun.
Though their banter can be a bit banal, the AI podcasters’ confidence and research are now arguably better than most people’s.
“We’ve just begun to cross the threshold of voice AI being pretty much indistinguishable from human,” said Alan Cowen, chief executive of Hume AI, a startup specializing in voice technology. “We’re seeing creators use it in all kinds of ways.”
AI can make podcasts sound better and cost less, industry insiders say, but the growing swarm of new competitors entering an already crowded market is disrupting the industry.
Some podcasters are pushing back, requesting restrictions. Others are already cloning their voices and handing over their podcasts to AI bots.
Popular podcast host Steven Bartlett has used an AI clone to launch a new kind of content aimed at the 13 million followers of his podcast “Diary of a CEO.” On YouTube, his clone narrates “100 CEOs With Steven Bartlett,” which adds AI-generated animation to Bartlett’s cloned voice to tell the life stories of entrepreneurs such as Steve Jobs and Richard Branson.
Erica Mandy, the Redondo Beach-based host of the daily news podcast called “The Newsworthy,” let an AI voice fill in for her earlier this year after she lost her voice from laryngitis and her backup host bailed out.
She fed her script into a text-to-speech model and selected a female AI voice from ElevenLabs to speak for her.
“I still recorded the show with my very hoarse voice, but then put the AI voice over that, telling the audience from the very beginning, I’m sick,” Mandy said.
Mandy had previously used ElevenLabs for its voice isolation feature, which uses AI to remove ambient noise from interviews.
Her chatbot host elicited mixed responses from listeners. Some asked if she was OK. One fan said she should never do it again. Most weren’t sure what to think.
“A lot of people were like, ‘That was weird,’” Mandy said.
In podcasting, many listeners feel strong bonds to hosts they listen to regularly. The slow encroachment of AI voices for one-off episodes, canned ad reads, sentence replacement in postproduction or translation into multiple languages has sparked anger as well as curiosity from both creators and consumers of the content.
Augmenting or replacing host reads with AI is perceived by many as a breach of trust and as trivializing the human connection listeners have with hosts, said Megan Lazovick, vice president of Edison Research, a podcast research company.
Jason Saldanha of PRX, a podcast network that represents human creators such as Ezra Klein, said the tsunami of AI podcasts won’t attract premium ad rates.
“Adding more podcasts in a tyranny of choice environment is not great,” he said. “I’m not interested in devaluing premium.”
Still, platforms such as YouTube and Spotify have introduced features for creators to clone their voice and translate their content into multiple languages to increase reach and revenue. A new generation of voice cloning companies, many with operations in California, offers better emotion, tone, pacing and overall voice quality.
Hume AI, which is based in New York but has a big research team in California, raised $50 million last year and has tens of thousands of creators using its software to generate audiobooks, podcasts, films, voice-overs for videos and dialogue generation in video games.
“We focus our platform on being able to edit content so that you can take in postproduction an existing podcast and regenerate a sentence in the same voice, with the same prosody or emotional intonation using instant cloning,” said company CEO Cowen.
Some are using the tech to carpet-bomb the market with content.
Los Angeles podcasting studio Inception Point AI has produced its 200,000 podcast episodes, accounting for 1% of all podcasts published on the internet, according to CEO Jeanine Wright.
The podcasts are so cheap to make that they can focus on tiny topics, like local weather, small sports teams, gardening and other niche subjects.
Instead of a studio searching for a specific “hit” podcast idea, it takes just $1 to produce an episode so that they can be profitable with just 25 people listening.
“That means most of the stuff that we make, we have really an unlimited amount of experimentation and creative freedom for what we want to do,” Wright said.
One of its popular synthetic hosts is Vivian Steele, an AI celebrity gossip columnist with a sassy voice and a sharp tongue. “I am indeed AI-powered — which means I’ve got receipts older than your grandmother’s jewelry box, and a memory sharper than a stiletto heel on marble. No forgetting, no forgiving, and definitely no filter,” the AI discloses itself at the start of the podcast.
“We’ve kind of molded her more towards what the audience wants,” said Katie Brown, chief content officer at Inception Point, who helps design the personalities of the AI podcasters.
Inception Point has built a roster of more than 100 AI personalities whose characteristics, voices and likenesses are crafted for podcast audiences. Its AI hosts include Clare Delish, a cooking guidance expert, and garden enthusiast Nigel Thistledown.
The technology also makes it easy to get podcasts up quickly. Inception has found some success with flash biographies posted promptly in connection to people in the news. It uses AI software to spot a trending personality and create two episodes, complete with promo art and a trailer.
When Charlie Kirk was shot, its AI immediately created two shows called “Charlie Kirk Death” and “Charlie Kirk Manhunt” as a part of the biography series.
“We were able to create all of that content, each with different angles, pulling from different news sources, and we were able to get that content up within an hour,” Wright said.
Speed is key when it comes to breaking news, so its AI podcasts reached the top of some charts.
“Our content was coming up, really dominating the list of what people were searching for,” she said.
Across Apple and Spotify, Inception Point podcasts have now garnered 400,000 subscribers.
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