English Entertainment
AXN goes on a ‘Road Trip’ this football season
MUMBAI: In a bid to broaden its programming range the action oriented AXN has announced a new programming band Road Trip. This basically celebrates major sporting and entertainment spectacles.
The initiative will kick off with a four part series on the football World Cup which kicks off on Friday in Germany. The show airs every Friday at 9 pm.
AXN Road Trip: Fifa World Cup 2006 will offer viewers a chance to get an inside glimpse of the global phenomenon that is the World Cup and all of the off-the-charts events and activities planned in and around the host cities.
The show’s host Neil Cole travels across Germany in search of the stories, the people, the places that make this the epic center stage of the world’s favorite sport this summer. The stakes are high as teams representing 32 countries vie for the World cup.
The show will travel across Germany to highlight all 12 host cities and will feature segments on the players and interviews with fans. It will also include qualifying moments from teams like Brazil, Germany, the Czech Republic, England and Argentina.
AXN will give viewers the chance to get up, close and personal with some of the sports great’s from around the globe. The show will have insight’s from veterans such as Germany’s Franz Beckenbauer, Brazil’s Pele, Argentina’s Diego Maradona, Italy’s Roberto Baggio, Holland’s Marco Van Basten, and Korea’s Cha Bum Keun will prepare viewers for what is to come, while reflecting on some of the greatest moments the World Cup has ever seen.
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.
