English Entertainment
Discovery to give viewers goosebumps
MUMBAI: Variety is the name of the game for Discovery as it seeks to increase its share.
Next month it will kickstart a variety of shows. One of them is America’s Most Haunted Places. It will air every Monday from 4 October at 10 pm.
As the show’s title implies it aims at making viewers break into a cold sweat. Each week the channel will go to locations in an American city where ghosts and ghouls have their presence felt.
The first episode goes to the city of dreams, sin and gambling Las Vegas. The casino in question is Flamingos. Several witnesses will testify that the founder Bugsy Siegel’s ghost lives there.
The programme also visits Hoover Dam. While it was being constructed 112 men died. While all the bodies were recovered ghosts still apparently haunt the place.
In the future the show will visit the Windy City Chicago. The stone water tower is allegedly haunted by a worker who had given up his life during a fire. He kept pumping water even as the flames engulfed him.
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.
