English Entertainment
‘Top Gear’ viewing figures decline after 13 years
MUMBAI: Even after achieving the best critical response, the third episode of Top Gear featuring Chris Evans is yet to see a reflection in its overnight ratings, which fell to 2.4 million, the lowest figure for the BBC2 show for more than a decade. The show was launched two weeks back with 4.3 million viewers before dipping for its second episode last week.
According to a report, the show’s lowest overnight audience is understood to be the 2.362 million who watched the sixth episode of the second Jeremy Clarkson series on 15 June 2003.
The rebooted show saw live viewership fall to about 2.4 million U.K. viewers. Out of about 170 episodes to date, just one, from June 2003, drew lower live viewership numbers, reports said.
New host Evans has suffered bulk of the criticism after taking over from Clarkson.
The BBC2 show’s Sunday night audience was its lowest for 13 years and only narrowly avoided being the lowest audience for any episode of Top Gear since it was reinvented by Jeremy Clarkson in 2002.
The show’s ratings are expected to increase when catch-up figures from fans watching online are taken into account but will likely still fall behind the numbers Clarkson and his co-hosts Richard Hammond and James May pulled in.
Evans has stood by Top Gear from a mauling, arguing on his Twitter account recently that “Overnight television viewing figures have never been less relevant but newspapers prefer to live in the past”. The previous week, he responded to critics by quoting overnight figures and writing: “The new Top Gear is a hit. OFFICIALLY. 23% audience share. 12% MORE than the opening episode of the last series. These are the FACTS.”
The response on Twitter was generally more favourable to the show but it was not enough to turn around its overnight ratings slide.
It will be interesting to see what does the team put into place to get more viewers from the upcoming episodes.
The series is the first since previous Top Gear presenters Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May left after Clarkson was fired for punching producer Oisin Tymon in 2015.
Reports also suggest that, Clarkson, Hammond and May will present a new car series, The Grand Tour, on Amazon Prime in autumn. The trio have signed a deal with the on-demand channel for three series of 12 hour-long episodes.
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.
