English Entertainment
AXN offers Indians chance to set Guinness records
AXN is ready to pep up the lives of action enthusiasts with “Be a Guinness World record Holder” contest to be held in India by the channel.
AXN aims to give people the opportunity to participate and perform the stunts that they only dreamt of, a la the Guinness Records series on the channel. The popular series hosted by Mark Thompson is a reality series based on the world-renowned Guinness Book of World Records.
The one-hour episodes on the show include multiple challenges during which ordinary participants go to ultimate extremes to either break an existing record or create new ones. Experts will judge participants in the various feats and winners of preliminary entries will get a chance to break the record on the day of the final event. The entire exercise is designed to personify the qualities of adventure, thrill and voyeurism that reflect AXN’s core brand values, says SET India assistant vice president, sales and marketing Rohit Bhandari.
Enthusiasts can try their luck by logging on to www.indiatimes.com or sending in entries at AXN, C/O Set India Pvt. Ltd, P. O. Bag 12121, Azad Nagar Post office, Veera Desai Road, Mumbai-400 053. The last date for receiving entries is 5 June 2002.
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.
