English Entertainment
HBO celebrates International Women’s Day
HBO celebrates International Women’s Day on 8 March 2005 with five films that showcase women who discover their passions.
The action starts at 6:30 am with Charlotte Gray. Oscar winner Cate Blanchett The Aviator plays a young Scottish woman who joins the French Resistance during World War II to rescue her Royal Air Force boyfriend who is lost in France.
At 9 am Stepmom takes centre stage. A successful photographer does her best to make her boyfriend’s kids feel at home but also loves her work and does not plan to give it up. The film stars Julia Roberts and Susan Sarandon. At 2:45 pm Tumbleweeds deals with the journey of a woman constantly running from town to town with her 12 year old daughter to escape failed relationships…
At 4:45 pm HBO will air its original movie Hysterical Blindness. Directed by Mira Nair the film deals with how women resort to desperate measures in unrelenting attempts to meet “Mr. Right”. Finally Blue Crush airs at 6:45 pm. As a hard-core surfer girl prepares for a big competition, she finds herself falling for a football player.
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.
