The much-loved central London institution, which has been threatened with closure since January 2025, secures 25-year lease without break clause with current landlords
The celebrated Prince Charles repertory cinema in London’s Leicester Square has announced that the threat of closure has been staved off by signing a new 25-year lease with its landlords.
In a post on social media titled “You Saved the PCC”, the cinema said that “after 21 months of uncertainty, we’re delighted to have secured the future of the cinema” and that they had “signed a new 25-year lease with no break clause, ensuring our projectors will keep rolling for years to come”.
Animation studio narrows annual loss to £1.1m amid ‘challenging market’ in children’s content
Don’t break out the celebratory Wensleydale just yet. Aardman, the British animation studio behind the cheese-loving inventor Wallace and his beloved dog Gromit, has fallen short of a target to get back in the black, its accounts show.
The employee-owned business was aiming to record a small profit in 2025 after two years of consecutive losses but was hit by production delays and a “challenging market” in children’s content.
The actor, who won the Academy Award for best actress this year, was speaking at the BFI and Chanel film-maker awards
Jessie Buckley has questioned whether the film industry places too much emphasis on Oscar campaigns at the expense of nurturing emerging talent, suggesting there may be greater potential in supporting film-makers at grassroots level.
Tom Cruise’s latest film could lose $250m (£190m) – could one reason be that audiences are tired of Hollywood telling them what they already know about the super-rich?
It seems as if nobody can decide who should shoulder most of the blame for the recent box office flop of Digger.
Was it the ousted Warner Bros film executives Mike De Luca and Pam Abdy, whose love of big-budget auteur cinema usually came with a hefty price tag? Or was it the marketing team, who were responsible for hiding the movie’s biggest swing from all trailers, ensuring many viewers would be left alienated from its early meta-reveal onwards?
Estimates suggest the eco satire starring Tom Cruise could join the list of top turkeys, including Cutthroat Island and The Marvels
Digger, the ambitious eco-fable starring Tom Cruise and directed by Alejandro G Iñárritu, is heading for an even worse financial outcome than previously thought, with reports suggesting it will lose around $245m (£185m), placing it among the biggest disasters in movie history.
According to a report in Variety, Digger’s estimated second weekend revenue in North America of $3.2m is a 60% drop on its opening weekend figure of $8m, meaning its current domestic gross is $14.4m, for a global total of $35.3m, with a projected final box office total of around $50m worldwide.
Commercials once launched careers from Ridley Scott to Guy Ritchie, now automated production is cutting costs – and the chance to learn by doing
When Ridley Scott was awarded the UK’s highest accolade for a glittering career directing films from Alien and Blade Runner to Gladiator and The Martian, he reminded those attending the Bafta event eight years ago that making commercials had been his “film school”.
The advertising industry has long been a breeding ground for British film and TV talent who have gone on to make the jump to Hollywood productions, including Guy Ritchie, who started out making music videos and commercials, and Paddington in Peru director Dougal Wilson, whose credits include a number of John Lewis’s famous Christmas ads.
After a windier road than expected, Paramount and Warner are now one, under the banner of Skydance, and the film industry is set for a shake-up
Hollywood’s big five have officially become the big four. Following a twist-filled saga that saw the century-old studio Warner Bros nearly acquired by the streaming giant Netflix, only to be outbid by Paramount owners Skydance, the company led by billionaire scion David Ellison. After facing legal opposition that ultimately crumbled, Warner Bros and Paramount are officially under the same corporate roof. They are divisions of Skydance, which joins Sony, Disney and Universal as the remaining major-studio players in Hollywood.
The merger goes beyond film production. Eventually, the streaming services HBO Max and Paramount+ will merge into a single entity, though a timeline has not been disclosed. The television channels HBO, Showtime, CBS, MTV, Comedy Central, Cartoon Network, Nickelodeon, TNT, TBS and CNN are among many now owned by a single corporation. The presence of CNN on that list has brought particular scrutiny, given the post-Skydance meddling with the once-respected CBS News, resulting in a rocky stewardship from Bari Weiss, who has overseen a dip in both ratings and prestige for the flagship program 60 Minutes. Weiss isn’t expected to add CNN to her purview; current chair Mark Thompson will remain in place for now, and Skydance has insisted that CNN will remain editorially independent. But given Ellison’s chumminess with Donald Trump, who has long ranted incoherently about CNN’s supposed biases, the presence of an oversight board with Ellison appointees has been cold comfort.
David Ellison and ex-Mattel CEO Ynon Kreiz to oversee both film studios, HBO Max, CNN and CBS News as co-executives
Paramount completed its $111bn acquisition of Warner Bros Discovery on Tuesday, consolidating some of the world’s most recognizable studios and news outlets after a bidding war with Netflix and months of legal turmoil.
The new company, now called Skydance, will have David Ellison, the son of a billionaire tech mogul, at its helm, with the former CEO of Mattel, Ynon Kreiz, as co-executive. They will oversee Paramount and Warner Bros’ movie studios, HBO Max, CBS News and CNN.
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