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.”
Business
Commentary: Trump wants to let companies make fewer disclosures, thus keeping investors in the dark
Trump’s SEC is considering eliminating the mandate for quarterly corporate financial reports, but even some big investors call it a lousy idea.
This being the “information age,” it would be understandable if investors sometimes feel inundated with too much information to wade through about the stocks in their mutual fund portfolios.
The Securities and Exchange Commission, bowing like a puppy to the urgings of President Trump, is considering exactly the wrong solution to this supposed burden. It’s proposing to allow public companies to give their investors less information, as though that’s a good thing.
On May 8, the SEC proposed rescinding its mandate that public companies report financial results on a quarterly schedule. Instead, it suggests, semiannual and annual reports should suffice.
This takes an already-unlevel playing field where Main Street investors are already disadvantaged, and makes it more unlevel.
— Dennis Kelleher, Better Markets
The SEC left its proposal open for public comment for 60 days, meaning the window closed Monday. By then, the agency had received more than 68,000 comments, according to a tracker posted online by accounting professor Tzachi Zach of Ohio State.
Almost 99.9% of the comments were negative. Several organizations of institutional investors and auditing professionals, as well as a tsunami of individual investors, expressed opposition.
A similar initiative the SEC aired in 2018, during Trump’s first term, received an overwhelmingly negative response and was eventually dropped.
The tide of opposition coming from individual investors shouldn’t be surprising. “Taking away basic quarterly information means investors are blind for six months at a time,” says Dennis Kelleher, co-founder and chief executive of the investor advocacy nonprofit Better Markets.
That’s especially true for small investors, though perhaps not so much for major institutions, insiders or deep-pocketed individuals. “If you’re a big dog, you’ll get the information anyway,” Kelleher told me. “And insiders, who are trading in their own stock all the time, will have the information. This takes an already-unlevel playing field where Main Street investors are already disadvantaged, and makes it more unlevel.”
Trump set off the latest initiative with a social media post on Sept. 15, advocating the move to a six-month reporting schedule. It read, in part, “This will save money, and allow managers to focus on properly running their companies. Did you ever hear the statement that, ‘China has a 50 to 100 year view on management of a company, whereas we run our companies on a quarterly basis???’ Not good!!!”
As was usual with Trump, his argument was a string of uninformed and irrelevant non sequiturs.
It’s doubtful that eliminating quarterly reports will save much, if any, money. Most 10-Qs are cookie cutter documents disclosing financial figures already embedded in corporate records.
The idea that managers would become empowered to “focus on properly running their companies” if only they were relieved of the burden of preparing a report every three months is just malarkey: Any CEOs who feel the impulse to drop everything and involve themselves in what is essentially an automated process can’t be very good at their jobs.
As for China’s “50 to 100 year view on management of a company,” what would that even mean, even if it were true? China doesn’t operate on a 50 to 100 year corporate horizon, but rather on a string of five-year plans. The most recent of these was adopted by the government in March, covers the period up to 2030, and is its 15th in a row.
Despite the flaws in Trump’s arguments, Trump’s SEC Chairman Paul Atkins, a former corporate lawyer and securities industry consultant, fell into line. Within a few days of Trump’s post, he showed up on CNBC to minimize the potential effect of the change. Private companies rely on semiannual reports, after all, he noted, although the idea of taking private companies as models for publicly traded corporations might not strike experienced investors as the wisest thing.
Atkins cited an enduring chestnut, for which there’s no evidence, that quarterly reporting is responsible for “short-term thinking” in corporate suites (though he admitted that his evidence was “anecdotal”). And he suggested that small investors have ample access to corporate information even without quarterly reports — why, he said, they can just tune in to CNBC!
“To propose change in what our rules are now would be a good way forward,” he said. “So I welcome the president’s putting this up for discussion.”
Something more insidious undergirds the SEC’s proposal than its immediate effect on corporate behavior. The agency rationalizes its proposal as seeking “a tradeoff between reducing regulatory burdens … and promoting efficient financial markets through timely disclosure.”
The problem here, Kelleher points out, is that “reducing regulatory burdens” isn’t part of the SEC’s mission in any way, shape or form. It’s a regulatory agency, and its mission since its founding in 1934 has been to protect investors, not to make things fluffier for stock issuers.
The history of financial disclosure in the U.S. shows a long-term trend favoring more disclosure, not less. In the 1880s, quarterly reporting by railroads and other transportation companies were common.
Early on, pressure for more frequent disclosure came not from government regulators, who barely existed before 1934, but from investors. The reporting of quarterly earnings, notes corporate finance expert Owen Lamont of Acadian Asset Management, was “a bottom-up historical phenomenon reflecting voluntary arrangements between firms and investors, not a top-down phenomenon imposed by law.”
By 1931, according to financial historians, 63% of New York Stock Exchange-listed firms were publishing their quarterly earnings. The Big Board mandated that frequency for most listed companies in 1939. The SEC mandated semiannual reports in 1955 and quarterly reports, as Atkins said, in 1970.
The evidence in favor of dropping the quarterly reports is uniformly thin. Some advocates cite a 2018 op-ed in the Wall Street Journal by JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon and Warren Buffett that was headlined “Short-Termism Is Harming the Economy.”
Couple of points about this: First, the target of Dimon and Buffett wasn’t quarterly financial reporting, but quarterly earnings guidance — that is, the practice of some top executives who project their earnings into the future. (This guidance usually comes at the same time they issue their SEC disclosures.)
It’s guidance, they wrote, that is “a major driver” of short-termism in corporate behavior. That’s because management is giving itself a target it feels obligated to meet, even if factors outside its control interfere with the quest.
Furthermore, Dimon and Buffett wrote, “Our views on quarterly earnings forecasts should not be misconstrued as opposition to quarterly and annual reporting.” They called transparency about financial and operating results “an essential aspect of U.S. public markets … so that the public, including shareholders and other stakeholders, can reliably assess real progress.”
Individual investors may be unmoved by the SEC’s proposal because — let’s be candid — how many of them read quarterly earnings reports, anyway? But that’s unimportant, Kelleher says, because other market participants are reading them. “So that information is in the marketplace, and that’s what actually enables price discovery, so stock prices roughly reflect what’s going on at a company, most of the time.”
More to the point, the quarterly reports reflect the highest-quality, detailed information, the information the SEC requires executives to disclose on pain of facing a civil lawsuit from the agency or even criminal liability for faking data. “Main Street investors, whether they read quarterly reports or not, are the real beneficiaries,” Kelleher says.
That’s so. The bottom line is that quarterly financial reporting helps investors. It doesn’t promote short-term behavior and its costs, modest as they are, don’t outweigh its benefits.
Over the decades, scandal-ridden corporations have hidden fraudulent behavior in the interstices between mandated disclosures—think Enron, WorldCom and Tyco, among others. Why give any corporation, even an honest one, the opportunity to disclose less?
The luxury shopping center in Pacific Palisades will reopen next month after more than $100 million in renovations forced by the January 2025 wildfire that devastated the Los Angeles neighborhood.
Palisades Village will reopen Aug. 15, owner Rick Caruso announced Wednesday. The outdoor center survived the blaze that destroyed homes and other businesses but needed refurbishment to eliminate contaminants that the fire could have spread.
Crews are putting finishing touches on mall buildings after tearing them down to the studs, treating the wood and rebuilding the walls, Caruso said.
“Everybody’s working, and stores are moving their products in,” he said. “It’s a really cool feeling that people have really locked arms and are working together.”
An electrician installs lighting for a restaurant at Rick Caruso’s Palisades Village on Thursday. The shopping center is scheduled to reopen mid-August.
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
Pacific Palisades resident Allison Polhill, who is rebuilding the home of 30 years that her family lost in the blaze, said she is “thrilled” at the prospect of returning to the mall she used to frequent. Its comeback is a boost for the community, she said.
“Every single step that we make to reopen our commercial corridors is going to bring more people back into the Palisades,” said Polhill, who expects to move back into her home at the end of August.
A total of 6,822 structures were destroyed in the Palisades fire, including more than 5,500 residences and 100 commercial businesses, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.
Caruso previously attributed the mall’s survival to the hard work of private firefighters and the fire-resistant materials used in the mall’s construction.
The $200-million shopping and dining center opened in 2018 with a movie theater and a roster of upmarket tenants, including Erewhon, which may be the only grocer in the heart of the fire-ravaged neighborhood when it opens.
Caruso’s company was able to fill the mall with tenants despite the long shutdown.
Palisades Village is 99% leased, with the majority of tenants returning, said Jackie Levy, chief financial and revenue officer. Nearly one-third of the shops and restaurants are new to the property.
A firefighter carries a hose back to his rig while walking through a destroyed home from the Palisades fire in Pacific Palisades on Jan. 7, 2025.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
Last year, Pacific Palisades-based fashion designer Elyse Walker said she would reopen her eponymous store in Palisades Village after losing her 25-year flagship location on Antioch Street to the inferno.
Other neighborhood shops destroyed in the fire that are reopening at the mall include K Bakery and Loomey’s Toys, which caters to children up to age 12 and used to be across the street from Palisades Elementary Charter School.
“It’s been a journey and I’m excited because I wasn’t sure that there was going to be a place to come back to,” said toy store owner Amanda Rastegar. “Hopefully we can bring some of that magic back.”
Rastegar’s home in the Palisades survived but was damaged by the fire. The family returned about eight weeks ago. Her last memory of the fire was a burning supermarket.
“I just couldn’t wrap my brain around what was happening,” she said. “By the time I left, Gelson’s was on fire.”
Among the returning tenants is Angelini Ristorante & Bar. Well-known Los Angeles chef Gino Angelini said he will be in the kitchen next month for a return of the Italian restaurant.
“We won’t do a big celebrity open,” he said. “We want to have a very soft opening and see our customers come back.”
Construction takes place at Rick Caruso’s Palisades Village on Thursday. The shopping center is scheduled to reopen mid-August.
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
An elaborate celebration would not feel “correct for me,” Angelini said, because the devastation has been “very sad” for so many.
Other new tenants include local chef Nancy Silverton, who has agreed to move in with a new Italian steakhouse called Spacca Tutto. Women’s activewear retailer LESET will open its first West Coast location.
Caruso said he is optimistic that customers will return to the center, even though many Pacific Palisades residents are still dispersed. One tracking system estimated that about 30% of the Village’s customer base was impacted by the fire, he said.
“That means 70% did not get impacted, so there’s a lot of customers still left out there,” Caruso said. Historically, the center drew customers from as far away as Beverly Hills and Calabasas, as well as Malibu, Brentwood and Santa Monica.
He also hopes many will be inspired to visit the revived mall.
“I believe in the goodness of people and I believe that people are going to want to support the Palisades,” he said. “They’re going to want to be there and support the businesses that have had the courage and the heart to reopen.”
Walmart is rapidly expanding its network of electric vehicle chargers designed for customers to use while they shop.
The network could help fill gaps in EV infrastructure in states with greater need for chargers. Walmart, which has more than 5,000 locations in the U.S. and hundreds in California, says more than 90% of Americans live within 10 miles of one of its stores.
The chargers also offer an incentive for customers to choose Walmart — Walmart Plus members will receive a 10% discount off an average price of $0.46 per kilowatt-hour of energy at the company’s chargers.
Walmart chargers are already available at more than 75 locations in 17 states, with Texas boasting the most charging stations, followed by Florida and Arizona.
Matthew Nelson, Walmart’s director of energy policy, said last week on LinkedIn that the network will soon reach 29 states, including California.
“We are delivering on the promise of affordable, reliable and convenient charging,” Nelson said in his post.
According to Walmart’s website, six charging stations are coming to California soon, though the company did not offer a specific timeline.
The chargers will be installed at stores in Antelope, Brea, Fresno, Stockton, Suisun City and Vallejo.
Most charging sites in California will include eight to 16 fast-charging stalls, said Walmart spokesperson Kelsey Bohl.
The company first announced plans in April 2023 to install its own EV chargers at Walmart and Sam’s Club stores, with a goal of installing thousands of chargers by 2030. Partnering with ABB E-Mobility and Alpitronic, it added 25 new charging sites this past May and six more in June.
“Walmart is building a leading retail-integrated EV fast-charging network, focused on delivering an affordable, reliable and convenient charging experience where customers already shop,” Bohl said in an emailed statement. “Customers can charge while they shop, access stations through the Walmart app they already use, and benefit from affordable pricing.”
The charging stations already available include 612 individual charging stalls using 400-kilowatt chargers. Each stall has a dual charging cord with both Combined Charging System and North American Charging Standard connectors. The standard connectors, designed by Tesla, are smaller and lighter than the combined systems.
The primary way to pay for the chargers is through the Walmart app, but the company is also experimenting with built-in credit card readers to allow those without the app to use the stations.
Customers can check charger availability on the Walmart app. The company said the chargers will be available 24 hours a day.
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