English Entertainment
Discovery to air Olympic special- Rural Olympics
MUMBAI: Seems like ‘desi’ is a real cool phenomenon. Cashing on the current flavour of the season, Discovery Channel will be presenting an exclusive preview of a film on Punjab’s sports extravaganza, The Rural Olympics.
The special series celebrating the forthcoming Olympic games will be airing on Discovery Channel from 9 August to 14 August from 8 pm to 9 pm.
The first programme from the series, The Rural Olympics, premieres on Monday, August 9 from 8 pm to 9 pm and repeats on Friday, August 13 from 8 pm to 9 pm.
A part of the Channels special Olympics series- The Athens Games Special Week, the programme is sponsored by one of the official sponsors of this years Athens Games Samsung, informs an official release.
The Rural Olympics showcases an Indian version of the Olympics celebrated every February in the villages of Punjab. The fascinating event captures the passion and the competitive spirit of the people representing over 2,000 villages of Punjab. Over 1,00,000 people from the region attend this unique sports extravaganza every year, adds the release.
Commenting on the special series, Discovery Communications India director-marketing Aditya Tripathi said, “As part of the build-up to the forthcoming Athens Games we are premiering The Athens Games Special Week, celebrating this historic event. The programme The Rural Olympics reflects the true spirit of Indian sportsmanship.”
The other programmes premiering at The Athens Games Special Week are: Marathon, the history behind the worlds most famous and gruelling race; Beastly Games, which unravels the complex industry known as the Roman arena games, in which wild, exotic beasts were exhibited, hunted and trained to execute animals in front of the Roman crowds; and Science of Super Human Strenght, which seeks to determine the limits of the human body.
Using a combination of historical research, re-enactments and contemporary and archival footage, the programmes highlight the dramatic similarities and differences between the original ancient pagan ritual and the modern Games, informs the release.
The channel had organised a screening of the special programme The Rural Olympics in capital in the presence of the cast of the film Lagaan – Raghuvir Bhura Yadav, Yashpal Lakha Sharma, Vallabh Ishwar Vyas, Raj Ismail Zutshi, Akhilendra Arjan Mishra, Pradeep Deva Rawat, Aditya Kachra Lakhiya, and Rajesh Guran Vivek, adds the release.
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.
