English Entertainment
Leno to step down from ‘The Tonight Show’ in 2009
Conan O’BrienMUMBAI: Stand-up comedian and television talk show host, Jay Leno announced on Monday that in 2009, he would be giving up the position of host of NBC’s The Tonight Show. Conan O’Brien has been named as Leno’s successor. Monday also happened to be The Tonight Show’s 50th anniversary.
“In 2009, I’ll be 59 years-old and will have had this dream job for 17 years. When I signed my new contract, I felt that the timing was right to plan for my successor and there is no one more qualified than Conan. Plus, I promised Mavis I would take her out for dinner before I turned 60,” Leno’s official statement was quoted in a media report.
O’Brien has already signed a new contract through which, he will be the host of Late Night with Conan O’Brien for the next five years for NBC, until he takes over from Leno at The Tonight Show. O’Brien has been hosting Late Night for the last 10 years. Prior to that, he was the writer for Saturday Night Live, for which, he won an Emmy and was also the writer and producer of The Simpsons.
Leno, on the other hand, started hosting The Tonight Show in 1992, when he took over from the show’s earlier host Johnny Carson.
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.
