News Broadcasting
AXN’s movie fest hits Mumbai tomorrow
Action television channel AXN, in collaboration with Pepsi and indiatimes.com, begins the Mumbai leg of their Action Movie Festival from tomorrow at the Central Plaza theatre in south Mumbai.
The week-long festival will be screening 28 of the best action movies including super hits like Independence Day, Matrix and the Oscar winning Gladiator. AXN is also organizing an AXN Dares You for the roadshows, which has also started in different parts of the city. Based on the popular Who dares win, the roadshows will give a taste of action to the people of Mumbai along with a chance to win passes for the shows. Catch the AXN roadshows at J49, Bandstand, Hiranandani grounds, St Xavier's College, Planet M, Crossroads and other popular hangouts.
Says, Rohit Bhandari, senior marketing manager, AXN: "Action Movie Festival, the brand, is aimed at extending the AXN experience from your television sets to a much broader canvas, on ground and into the theatres. After a very successful run in its inaugural year last year, AMF has been conceived on a larger, more interactive scale. The festival not only spans many more cities in the coming months but also has a wider range of action packed movies showcasing the best entertainers in business of providing action entertainment to audiences worldwide."
The titles include thrillers such as Bone Collector, Entrapment, Negotiator, Mission Impossible, Jackal, all-time classics such as Braveheart, Broken Arrow, Charlies Angels, Matrix, Gladiator and U.S. Marshals as well as recent action blockbusters such as Vertical limit, Charlie's Angels, Rush Hour, Shanghai Noon, amongst others. The movies star popular action heroes and screen icons such as Russel Crowe, Mel Gibson, Jackie Chan, Tom Cruise and Bruce Willis to name a few.
After a succesful run in Chandigarh, the festival moved to Pune, Ahmedabad and Chennai where close to 30,000 people turned up at each of the roadshows, an official release states. AMF is scheduled to hit more cities in the coming months.
Organised in association with indiatimes.com, an online contest is currently on which gives visitors the chance to win passes for all the 28 movies across seven days.
News Broadcasting
Senior media executive Madhu Soman exits Zee Media
Former Reuters and Bloomberg leader says he leaves with “no regrets” after brief stint at WION and Zee Business
NOIDA: Madhu Soman, a veteran of global newsrooms and media sales floors, has stepped away from Zee Media Corporation after a short stint steering business strategy for WION and Zee Business.
In a reflective LinkedIn note marking his departure, Soman said his time within the network’s corridors was always likely to be brief. “Some chapters close faster than expected,” he wrote, signalling the end of a nearly two-year spell in which he oversaw both editorial partnerships and commercial strategy.
Soman joined Zee Media in 2022 after more than a decade abroad with Reuters and Bloomberg, returning to India to take on the role of chief business officer for WION and Zee Business. His mandate was ambitious: bridge the newsroom and the revenue desk while expanding digital and broadcast reach.
During the stint, Zee Business reached break-even for the first time since its launch in 2005, while WION refreshed programming and strengthened its digital footprint across platforms such as YouTube and Facebook.
But Soman suggested the cultural fit proved uneasy. Describing himself as a “cultural misfit”, he hinted at deeper tensions between editorial instincts shaped in global newsrooms and the realities of India’s television news ecosystem.
Before joining Zee, Soman spent more than seven years at Bloomberg in Hong Kong as head of broadcast sales for Asia-Pacific, expanding the company’s news syndication business across several markets. Earlier, he held senior editorial roles at Reuters, overseeing online strategy in India and managing Reuters Video Services from London.
His career began in television and wire reporting, including a stint with ANI during the 1999 Kargil conflict, before moving into digital publishing as India’s internet media landscape took shape.
Now, after nearly three decades in broadcast and digital media, Soman is leaving Delhi NCR and returning to his hometown, Trivandrum.
Exhausted, he admits. But unbowed. And with one quiet line that sums up the journey: he didn’t sell his soul — because some things, after all, are not for sale.
