English Entertainment
BBC America, HBO win multiple Peabody awards
MUMBAI: HBO, Cinemax and BBC America have won multiple Peabody awards in the US. The Peabody Award is considered to be very selective and prestigious and is administered by the University of Georgia.
The ceremony takes place on 16 May in New York City.
BBC America won two awards for State of Play a gripping political thriller and The Kumars at No. 42. The sitcom was cited by the Peabody Board for its fusion of genres that never fails to delight as it illustrates the quirks that unite families, regardless of culture or background. In India, the show airs on Star World. The local version that involves a Parsi family airs on Sony.
The History Channel’s Rwanda-Do the Scars Ever Fade? was honoured for documenting world humanitarian issues. Through first-person accounts the documentary special asks the question of how an entire nation and culture can recover from the terrors of its past.
Comedy Central’s The Daily Show with Jon Stewart ‘Indecision 2004’ won a Peabody for its presidential campaign coverage. The Peabody Board cited the show’s appeal as satire that deflates pomposity on an equal opportunity basis. This is the programme’s second Peabody; it also won for its 2000 election coverage.
Cinemax received honours for the documentary Bus 174. This is an examination of the disintegration of a violent hostage situation in Brazil – covered live on TV. HBO was cited for Beah: A Black Woman Speaks. This is a loving biographical tribute to actress Beah Richards and was cited by the Peabody Board as giving a remarkable insight into her life as an actress, poet and teacher. Its movie Something the Lord Made, which is the true story of two men who defied racial strictures in the Jim Crow South and pioneered the field of heart surgery in 1944, was also cited.
Discovery won for Black Sky: The Race for Space. This documentary chronicles the first great aeronautical feat of the 21st century and its reinvention of space travel.
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.
