English Entertainment
BBC wins two interactive Baftas
MUMBAI: The BBC scooped two trophies at the 2003 Bafta Interactive Awards. One was for the Celebdaq website and the other was for the interactive radio drama Dark House.
Celebdaq is the virtual stock exchange website which allows users to buy and sell shares in celebrities. It won in the Online Entertainment category for the best use of the internet to deliver a pure entertainment experience.
Celebdaq was created by the BBC’s Interactive Drama & Entertainment department. It was one of the first BBC online formats to successfully transfer to television, becoming a series on BBC Three.
Meanwhile Dark House invites listeners inside the heads of its three protagonists and, at regular three-minute ‘switching points’, allowed them to change the perspective of the drama by voting by text or by telephone. The show is a joint production between BBC New Media’s creative research and development team, BBC Radio and Music Interactive, Radio 4 and Radio Drama.
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.
