The Paramount-WBD Merger Has Documentary Filmmakers on Edge, as They Fear for the Future of Archival Footage

The documentary film community has faced its fair share of hardship over the last few years, as securing funding and distribution for social issue and/or political docs — see “No Other Land,” “The Bibi Files,” “Mr. Nobody Against Putin,” “Zurawsksi v Texas” — has become a grueling, formidable undertaking. Now, the impending Paramount–Warner Bros. Discovery merger has the doc community concerned about the future of another essential subgenre: archival docs. If Paramount Skydance CEO’s David Ellison’s $111 billion bid for Warners is successful, Paramount would gain control of not only 85 years of CBS News footage, but also CNN’s vast archive of some 4 million assets. That library alone encompasses more than 45 years of broadcast coverage of global news, wars, elections, and major political events. Given Ellison’s October 2025 appointment of Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief of CBS News, which critics have argued has coincided with a more conservative shift in the network’s coverage, documentary filmmakers are increasingly concerned that access to archival footage from CBS News and CNN could become more difficult. They believe that holds particularly true for projects that might be perceived as critical of President Donald Trump or his administration. “Anytime an organization starts to put under their umbrella a bunch of organizations, it’s going to have an impact,” veteran doc editor/producer/director Sam Pollard (“MLK/FBI”) told IndieWire. “The fact that Paramount is going to have CNN and Warner Bros., which includes HBO, with whom I’ve done a lot of work, is going to have an impact both financially, socially, and politically, particularly with who David Ellison is.” In addition to anticipated censorship and increased licensing fees, there is widespread concern over access to the CNN archives. In April, according to the Archival Producers Alliance, CNN Collection, the content licensing arm of CNN Worldwide, laid off seven of its eight licensing staff members. ‘MLK/FBI’IFC Films In an email obtained by IndieWire from CNN to a concerned archival producer, network brass wrote, “Bottom line is that CNN is fully committed to its comprehensive and historic collection of content, which continues to grow with our award-winning journalism and video from around the world. And as the media landscape continues to evolve, we are aligning our workflows to better serve our clients with CNN’s world-class rights-cleared clips archive.” Archival producer Christine Fall, who has worked on documentaries — including Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11,” Susan Lacy’s “Jane Fonda in Five Acts,” and Jesse Short Bull and Laura Tomaselli’s “Lakota Nation vs. United States” — said that, when the merger was announced in December, she was just beginning a new project. “I was just like, ‘We are not using CNN,’” Fall said, who worries that the merger will cause a disruption to access. “I’m avoiding them as a source already, preemptively.” While she is steering clear of CNN for the moment, Fall said that the network’s archival collection is “special and important.” “What people don’t realize is the CNN collection started in 1980, and it’s the first around-the-clock, 24-hour news channel,” Fall said. “so if you are trying to do a story that is set in the 1980s, CNN is going to be invaluable to you, because they are probably going to have something when nobody else does. All the other networks at the time were still only doing their half-hour evening news, which only covers so much.” In a statement to IndieWire, a CNN spokesperson said, “The CNN archive continues to add assets, it continues to work with filmmakers, and it continues to license world-class rights-cleared clips. It continues to generate revenue, and it remains a strong part of our business. We have aligned our internal workflows in a different manner, and the operation of licensing clips remains the same for clients.” The archives of CNN, CBS, ABC, and NBC News are not open repositories; they are controlled by commercial licensing systems. Access to footage requires a sizable payment, disclosure of the project’s editorial purpose, legal review, and approval before material can be released. That process gives rights holders — including Disney for ABC, Getty for NBC, and Warner Bros. Discovery for CNN — discretion over how their archival material is licensed and, in some cases, the context in which it may appear in a documentary. ‘Lakota Nation vs. United States’IFC Films In June, the APA, an organization that represents over 650 producers worldwide who specialize in finding and licensing archival footage, warned that bringing the archival holdings of CBS News and CNN under a single corporate umbrella could not only result in restricted access to some of the world’s most important news footage, but also raise questions about editorial control and who ultimately decides which images and clips documentary filmmakers are able to license. “If Paramount and Warner merge, we believe there is potential of restrictions on use of historic materials,” said APA co-founder Stephanie Jenkins. “Whether that be by higher pricing, limits on usage due to where a film is being exhibited, or the as a result of a political bent of a film,” Rachel Antell, also an APA co-founder, added, “The four networks who have documented our history over the last many decades — ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN — are typically where one would go if you want to tell stories about the last 50 to 75 years. This merger would put two of those four under one decision-making tree potentially, and that’s scary. It’s a significant diminishment of possibilities.”Antell has seen it before, as past corporate consolidation has reduced and politicized access to archival news footage. She pointed to 2019, when The Walt Disney Company, which owns ABC News, instituted a new policy restricting the licensing of its aired stories, as well as footage featuring its reporters and anchors, to only Disney-owned outlets.“If an independent documentary about September 11 had wanted to use a clip of Peter Jennings on that day, this policy would have prevented them from doing so, unless the film were to air on a channel like Disney+, ABC, or Hulu,” said Antell. “Suddenly, in 2019, we couldn’t get screeners of branded material if the doc we were working on was not confirmed to be airing on a Disney-owned station. Somewhere around 2022, we started to notice that there was more wiggle room, and it opened back up from there. We’ve been puzzling the pieces together ourselves ever since. While the policy was ultimately reversed, dozens of documentaries were denied access to national stories in the meantime.” Jenkins said that CBS, ABC, and NBC have always had the power to say no a licensing deal with an outside source. “It’s not like they historically wielded that power willy-nilly,” said Jenkins. But in the current climate, I think filmmakers are concerned about how that’s going to play out. If the networks are nervous and are experiencing new control over the editorial use of their content, it’s going to give filmmakers pause about what stories they can tell.”Jenkins pointed to an Archival Producers Alliance member who, during a war the U.S. was involved in, was told by a news archive that they could not license historical footage of a previous war because it “showed American soldiers in a bad light,” despite having licensed the same exact footage for a previous project.“Quietly, swaths of American broadcast history are becoming accessible only to those who already own them,” APA members stated in an op-ed for Poynter. “With these shifts, the future of stories being told — that powerful institutions would prefer remain untold — dims. The harms that this consolidation could cause would take decades to remedy. If audiovisual material is destroyed or lost under the new management, the damage is irreversible.” Writer and producer P.G. Morgan, who worked on the CNN “Decades” series, said, “It’s not just potential censorship. It’s the loss of a certain way of seeing and understanding the world around us.” ‘Fahrenheit 9/11’©Lions Gate/Courtesy Everett Collection In recent years, Fall said that archive houses have been “taking a closer look before they license certain things” and asking more questions about how the material will be used. “It has intensified because of all these lawsuits with the Trump administration,” said Fall. “So, if you are working on something that is going to be considered critical of Donald Trump and his administration or in any way controversial, that’s going to be an issue, and you are probably going to approach that with a really good fair use lawyer from the get-go.” Fair use makes it clear that copyright cannot become a form of private censorship by promoting freedom of expression and permitting the unlicensed — i.e., the unauthorized, free use — of copyright-protected works in certain circumstances. Filmmakers, news gatherers, critics, or educators can use copyrighted works (news clips, audiobooks, movies, music, photographs, etc.) without permission if the asset adds context to a project. Creators can only invoke what is “reasonably appropriate” of the copyrighted material, in terms of length, to illustrate or sufficiently support the point being made. There are no stated time minimums or maximums. To avoid the hassle of fair use, independent production teams often spend three, sometimes four times as much money on license fees for the same image or clip as high-budget projects commissioned by high-volume licensees like Netflix, HBO or Apple. As other archives have consolidated under fewer owners, higher prices are being demanded for the use of footage. The APA said that media conglomerates, such as Tegna, which operates 64 local television stations in 51 U.S. markets, are known to charge tens of thousands of dollars per minute for usage by outside companies, making certain stories financially unfeasible to independent filmmakers. “The reality is, they [the networks] are not here to help you; they are here to make money,” Pollard said. His most recent films — “Tutu,” about the life and legacy of the Nobel Prize-winning anti-apartheid activist Desmond Tutu, and “The Lorraine,” about the motel that served as a safe haven for African Americans traveling during segregation and Jim Crow in the United States — were reliant on archival materials.While licensing archives to outside sources is lucrative, Bell questions how important archive houses are to media conglomerates. “My guess is that it is profitable for them, but it’s not a huge moneymaker,” said Bell.Juan Andrés Bello, a documentary researcher and producer who has worked on historical docs commissioned by A&E, The Biography Channel, and HBO Latin America, said that the consolidation of archival houses is a concern not just for U.S. documentary filmmakers. “These American news archives have an essential significance in terms of understanding global affairs,” Bello said. “Any limitations of access will have an impact in terms of research and dissemination of knowledge, not just for American citizens, journalists, scholars, creators, and producers based in the U.S., but also people around the world.” The APA has endorsed the Future Film Coalition’s Block the Merger Campaign, which is working to make lawmakers and the public aware of the adverse impacts of the merger. In July, the organization urged UK Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy to issue a Public Interest Intervention Notice regarding the proposed Paramount-Skydance takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery. On August 6, Nandy decided not to block the merger. Stateside, Paramount has agreed to delay closing the deal until as late as June 1, 2027, as a federal antitrust trial is scheduled to begin on March 2, 2027, following a lawsuit filed by 12 state attorneys general. “I’ve been doing this for many years and the trend since I started is closing access, minimizing access, and adding gatekeepers for all archives,” said Fall. “It has become much more controlled, and they now have moved to ‘this is for our projects’ because now these news media companies are part of a big huge company. So, they want to keep that exclusive for themselves. It’s very concerning.”