British film studios recover after ‘horrific’ US actors’ strike
The boss of Pinewood Studios believes Britain’s film production industry is “starting to rebuild” after suffering “horrific” consequences from the US actors’ strike.
However, David Conway said the sector should not expect a return to the heady post-pandemic years when the so-called streaming wars saw the likes of Netflix, Disney and Amazon commission large amounts of new film and television programming to draw in subscribers.
The UK is a major hub for international film and TV production. When the Hollywood strikes hit in July 2023, many productions ground to a halt, meaning tens of thousands of people, many of them freelancers, lost work.
Unlike many companies in the sector, Pinewood, which also owns Shepperton Studios, proved resilient through the period of the strikes, because streamers and film companies were already committed to long-term contracts on its premises.
Last week the company reported to bondholders that it had made revenues of £49 million in the three months to the end of June this year, an annual leap of 38 per cent. The growth was driven by a planned expansion of its studio space. Over the year to March 2024, its turnover totalled £147 million, and its earnings grew by £10 million to £86 million.
Conway said that Shepperton, which has recently expanded from 14 stages to 31, was “brimming — we’ve got ten-plus productions going on there for Netflix”. On the wider British film production sector, he said work was returning, but added: “We’re going to have more normalised growth going forward, inflation-like growth. We’re not going to have the hockey-stick growth that we saw back in 2022.”
The company, which was taken off the London Stock Exchange in 2016 and now counts real estate investor Aermont Capital as its owner, operates dozens of filming studios and sound stages across Pinewood and Shepperton, both located west of London, and in Toronto.
Pinewood said that 18 film and TV shows were in production across its studios. Both Netflix and Amazon have signed long-term leases for Pinewood studios.
