English Entertainment
Fox garners billion dollars in overseas film revenues
MUMBAI: It pays to make sequels in Hollywood. Fox has become the first studio this year to cross the billion dollar mark in film revenue earned outside the US.
Two sequels Ice Age 2 and X Men 3 helped achieve this result.A report in Hollywood Reporter states that Ice Age 2 has made $441 million. This is more than double the $192 million made in the US.
X Men 3 made $160.1 million, the Oscar winner Walk the Line made $64.8 million. Even the critically lambasted The Pink Panther made a decent $64.3 million. In the pipeline for the studio are potential box office hits including a Garfield sequel and a Meryl Streep film The Devil Wears Prada.
It is the second year in a row that Fox has been the first studio to hit the billion dollar mark abroad. Last year, the Star Wars movie helped it cross the mark. Meanwhile, Sony Pictures has made over $800 million, mainly due the critically panned The Da Vinci Code.
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.
