English Entertainment
Movies Now celebrates 10 spectacular years
MUMBAI: Movies Now, home to Blockbusters, celebrates the successful completion of a decade in entertaining its viewers with the best-in class Hollywood content. Redefining the way viewers watch English movies in India, Movies Now that offers a distinctive movie viewing experience, has been instrumental in shaping the consumer appetite for English content.
Recording many firsts and exclusives with movie premieres, path breaking initiatives and curated properties as a market leader in the category, Movies Now has reflected on the preferences of Indian viewers, who love to watch popular and universally celebrated blockbuster Hollywood titles. Pioneering the superlative quality viewing of the movies, Movies Now was the first Hollywood Movie channel to launch in HD in India. Successfully driving immersive consumer engagement, Movies Now led the innovative use of AR for its Spielberg Special property as well as 3D OOH sites for promotions of the movie Avatar. Augmenting the Hollywood experience, Movies Now was the first to present DC and Marvel titles together for its viewers in India. The channel through the course of seven seasons of its flagship property, 100 Mania, has successfully implemented India’s biggest consumer engagement activity.
Celebrating this iconic milestone, the channel has announced #10YearsofMoviesNOW, a special campaign that brings a line-up of exciting and engaging activities. Presenting movie aficionadas a unique opportunity to be part of the week long celebration, where they can exclusively handpick their favourite movies from a selection of top Hollywood blockbusters that will air on the big day, Movies NOW hosted a movie poll on its Instagram stories which witnessed an unprecedented engagement. Making the celebrations a memorable and collaborative experience for the viewers and the brand, the channel launched a curated game filter on Instagram that allows fans to win exciting prizes by collecting the Movies NOW 10-year special logo to score points and share it on their stories tagging the channel. Recognising and rewarding the channel’ s loyal viewer base, Movies Now has rolled out a ‘Watch and Win’ contest on TV, where participants have to screenshot and tweet the special Jackpot, that will appear on their screens during the movies, spins to 10 10 10.
Times Network news & English entertainment cluster business head & strategy president Vivek Srivastava said, “It’s been a fantastic journey so far and we are absolutely thrilled to achieve this milestone. We set out with a promise of creating an unprecedented movie viewing extravaganza for our viewers and today, we are proud that we have consistently delivered on that. Through the last ten years, each of our initiatives and properties have met with a phenomenal viewer response, which is a testament to our robust and diverse content strategy. As we march ahead, we aim to continue raising the bar and setting new benchmarks in the category.”
Movies Now has also rolled out an integrated promotional plan that includes special promos across the network channels and social media assets, digital promotions and print ads across Times Group leading dailies.
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.
