English Entertainment
Hallmark puts a modern twist on Dickens’ ‘A Christmas Carol’
MUMBAI: Magic is everywhere, a miracle is for everybody! This Christmas Hallmark the channel that deals with emotions will bring yuletide cheer to viewers through its programme band X-Mas Nights.
Five films will air this week. One of them that encapsulates what Christmas is all about is A Carol Christmas. This airs on 25 December at 9:45 pm. When you pit three ghosts against a feisty over ambitious television host you get a modern take on Charles Dickens’ classic novel A Christmas Carol..
Like the character Scrooge in the novel the lead chcracter played by Tori Spelling is self obsessed. She only cares about herself and the ever important Nielsen ratings. One night the ghost of her Aunt Marla (Marley) Dinah Manoff visits her and warns her that she will be visited by three ghosts.
Fallen Angel airs on 26 December at 9:45 pm. Gary Sinise plays a man who is consumed by work. After learning of his estranged father’s death and returns home to settle his affairs. While he plans to stay only a few days, the man’s visit is prolonged when he gets caught up in the life of a woman he has not seen since he was a child.
Through helping her reunite with her own father, whom she has never met, he discovers a side to his father that he never knew. Sinise falls in love with the woman and her young daughter and realises what’s truly important in life.
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.
