English Entertainment
Bond festival gathering steam on Star Movies
MUMBAI: With the latest James Bond film Casino Royale in theatres across the country Star Movies’ month long initiative Absolute Bond Festival is gathering steam.
On 20 November 2006 the channel airs Octopussy. Roger Moore plays the ttile role. When 009 turns up dead clutching a fake Faberge egg, Bond is sent to investigate. When the real jewelry is auctioned at Sotheby’s, 007 follows the seller, Kamal Khan (Jordan) to India, where he meets Octopussy (Adams), the head of a female gang of smugglers. Learning Khan and Octopussy are partners with General Orlov (Steven Berkoff), an insane Soviet hardliner, Bond races to West Berlin, where Octopussy’s circus is entertaining American troops. Dressed as a clown, 007 races against time to find and disarm a nuclear bomb planted by Orlov as part of his mad scheme to invade and conquer Europe.
Another Moore Bond A View To A Kill airs on 21 november at 9 pm. This marked Moore’s final appearance as Bond. He has to stop Madcap computer industrialist Max Zorin (Christopher Walken) from triggering a massive earthquake in Silicon Valley and annihilating the global computer market.
With the help of geologist Stacey Sutton (Tanya Roberts), Bond must contend with May Day (Jones) and Zorin’s endless supply of henchmen.
On 22 November the channel airs The Living Daylights with Timothy Dalton in his first outing as Bond. Narrowly missed by a female sniper, Soviet General Georgi Koskov (Jeroen Krabb) defects to England. During his debriefing, Koskov informs MI6 that KGB chief Leonid Pushkin (John Rhys-Davies) has started a new operation: Smiert Spionem: Death to Spies.
With one of their agents already dead, M orders Bond to assassinate Pushkin. Not trusting Koskov, Bond learns the sniper was the general’s girlfriend, Kara Milovy (Maryam D’Abo). Traveling to Tangiers, Bond discovers Koskov’s partners with arms dealer Brad Whitaker (Joe Don Baker). Captured, Bond’s sent to Afghanistan, where Koskov makes an opium purchase worth millions. Escaping, Bond destroys the opium and returns to Tangiers, where he kills Whitaker and Pushkin arrests Koskov for high treason.
On 23 November the channel airs Licence To Kill which was the second and last film with Dalton. When drug lord Franz Sanchez (Davi) exacts his brutal vengeance on Bond’s friend Felix Leiter (David Hedison), 007 resigns from the British Secret Service and begins a fierce vendetta against the master criminal.
Bond won’t be satisfied until Sanchez is defeated, and to accomplish this aim he allies himself with a beautiful pilot (Lowell) and Sanchez’s sexy girlfriend (Talisa Soto). But Bond, relegated to outlaw status, must battle agents on both sides of the law as he discovers the horrifying extent of his prey’s resources.
The channel has also quoted Tam data c&s 4+ Males SEC A, A+ saying that since the Bond festival started there has been a 58 per cent jump in channel shares compared to the previous six weeks. While reach of the channel remains constant, there was a 37 per cent improvement in weekly time spent.
Star VP marketing Satya Raghavan says, “James Bond is a global phenomenon and is hugely popular in India. The Absolute Bond festival on Star Movies has created an enormous amount of buzz and excitement amongst its viewers. We are extremely delighted at the response and this line up of Bond films will keep the viewers entertained and coming back for more! If you haven’t caught them already, there are eight more movies to go”.
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.
