English Entertainment
Star World to air NBC hit show ‘The Apprentice’
MUMBAI: Star World is going further down the reality route to hook viewers. It will air the NBC show The Apprentice, from 17 September at 10 pm. The show was nominated for four Emmy awards.
The show is hosted by real estate magnate Donald Trump and sees 16 candidates arrive in New York hoping to win a salary of $250,000 and a dream job-being the President of a Trump company. Trump will be their boss over the next 14 weeks. Besides being a business tycoon, he owns the Miss Universe Pageant.
The Apprentice was the number one new show of television season among total viewers aged 18-49. An average of 20.7 million people watched the show each week and 40.1 million watched all or some of the finale. The Apprentice is the top-rated new series on any US TV network in the last five years for adults aged 18-49.
According to the official communiqué out of 215,000 applicants, 16 people were hand picked to participate in what has been described as a “14-week job interview.” From there, the candidates are divided into two teams of eight: men (Versacorp) vs. women (Protégé).
Each week there will be a business task for each team to accomplish ranging from selling a product to managing a restaurant to devising an advertising campaign. Each team will select a “project manager” for that week to lead the team and the project manager will be held partly responsible for that team’s success or failure. The losing team will meet with “The Donald” after the task competition, and one member of that team will be fired.
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.
