English Entertainment
Zoom lines up New Year specials
MUMBAI: Zoom has lined up a series of specials this New Year with the best of the past. It is offering a complete bonanza of sorts with shows like Maximum Style, Popkorn Newz, Page 3, Santa and Banta Unlimited and more.
Maximum Style, will take a tour of the trends that ruled the ramp in 2006 in the New year special episode on 29 December at 8:30 pm.
The New Year special episode will give an insight into the trends that the fashion guru’s predict for the coming season.
Popkorn Newz will focus on the the top ten Bollywood controversies of the year: from Ash-Abhishek marriage rumours to Aamir’s Fanaa controversy. Popkorn Newz New Year special will also bring to light the trivia of Rakhi- Mika fight.
The Best of Popkorn Newz, the new year special episode, will be aired on 30 December at 8 pm and will also showcase the controversy of Ekta kapoor boycotting Indian Television Awards.
Page 3 New Year special will be a recollection of the exclusive news and controversies of the year 2006. The Best of Page 3 will air on 30 December at 7 pm and will bring minute by minute account of the the biggest of superstar wars from Salman- John’s rift to Amitabh- Shah Rukh’s stand-off.
Santa and Banta Unlimited, Zoom’s foray into comedy, will bring the top five interviews of 2006 on the show. The special interviews of Bappi Lahiri, Shaan, Chunkey Pandey, Arjun Rampal and Riya Sen with Siddharth Kannan and Baba Saigal will be aired on 1 January at 8:30 pm.
English Entertainment
Ellison takes his Paramount-Warner Bros case straight to theater owners
The Skydance chief goes to CinemaCon with promises and a skeptical crowd waiting
CALIFORNIA: David Ellison strode into a room packed with thousands of cinema owners and executives at CinemaCon in Las Vegas on Thursday and did something rather bold: he looked them in the eye and asked them to trust him.
The chief executive of Paramount Skydance vowed that his company would release a minimum of 30 films a year if regulators greenlight its proposed $110 billion acquisition of Warner Bros Discovery, a deal that has made theater owners deeply, and loudly, nervous.
“I wanted to look every single one of you in the eye and give you my word,” Ellison told the crowd. “Once we combine with Warner Bros, we are going to make a minimum of 30 films annually across both studios.”
It was a confident pitch. Whether it landed is another matter. Cinema operators have already called on regulators to block the deal, and scepticism in the room was hardly concealed.
Ellison pushed back by pointing to recent form. Paramount, born from the merger of Paramount Global and Skydance Media last August, plans to release 15 films this year, nearly double the eight it put out in 2025. Progress, he argued, was already underway.
He also threw theater owners a bone they have long been chasing: all films, he pledged, would run exclusively in cinemas for a minimum of 45 days, drawing applause from a crowd that has spent years fighting for exactly that commitment across the industry.
“People can speculate all they want,” Ellison said, “but I am standing here today telling you personally that you can count on our complete commitment. And we’ll show you we mean it.”
Fine words. The regulators, however, will have the last one.
