"'The real financial value behind this deal is the treasure trove of IP in the deep catalog that we plan to reimagine and develop together with MGM’s talented team,' said Mike Hopkins, senior vice president of Prime Video and Amazon Studios... The deal emphasizes Amazon’s willingness to spend deeply to remain competitive in the crowded streaming market... [MGM] owns the James Bond catalog and has made several hit shows including 'The Handmaid’s Tale' and 'Fargo.' It also owns premium cable network Epix and owns several popular reality TV shows, including 'Shark Tank,' 'Survivor' and 'The Real Housewives.'"
That list of what MGM owns seems ludicrously wan. The only movies mentioned in that article are "the James Bond catalog." At Variety, the story names a few more movies, the ones that Hopkins himself listed: “12 Angry Men,” “Basic Instinct,” “Creed” and “Rocky,” “Legally Blonde,” “Moonstruck,” “Poltergeist,” “Raging Bull,” “Robocop,” “Silence of the Lambs,” “Stargate,” “Thelma & Louise,” “Tomb Raider,” “The Magnificent Seven,” “The Pink Panther,” “The Thomas Crown Affair.”
Meanwhile, MGM has been around since the 1920s, and there are so many great movies from all those decades — nearly a century. But all that grandeur amounts to just about nothing in our stupid little world of TV streaming. Here they are touting the "treasure trove of IP in the deep catalog" and they don't name one thing from the Golden Age of Hollywood. Does anyone even use that term anymore?
IN THE COMMENTS: I knew some of old MGM movies had changed hands — specifically, "The Wizard of Oz," but readers emailed me to say MGM unloaded all the "golden age" material.
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3 comments:
Readering writes: "The article does not mention Golden Age titles because MGM sold its pre-1986 catalogue to Warner over 20 years ago. But it also bought other film catalogues over the years, such as UA, so it still owns a valuable library. Very complicated story."
Lloyd writes:
"It's interesting how big business is fragmenting the viewing public. Generally speaking, before TV everyone saw the same movies. The 10 top-grossing movies, adjusted for inflation, still include Gone With the Wind at #1, The Ten Commandments from 1956, a few from the 60s, and three post-2000. I have not seen any of those three, so I guess I'm old. Lists vary, but one list still has Snow White (1937) at #10, and Fantasia (1941) at #22. I gather Disney has their own "channel," and they are refusing to show Song of the South, which Walt thought would be considered his masterpiece. The same list has MGM's Dr. Zhivago at #8, and Ben-Hur at #13. (https://web.archive.org/web/20140702210221/http://boxofficemojo.com/alltime/adjusted.htm )
"In the Golden Age of TV the biggest shows' ratings went beyond anything that seems possible today. Maybe Seinfeld was the last show that "everyone" talked about at work the next day. Now Netflix has many competing streaming services, and how many people watch the number one show, whatever that is? Weirdly (to me), the royal family stuff may have the widest or broadest demographic."
Vance writes: "
The reason no Golden Age movies were mentioned in that MGM-Amazon story is that today's MGM no longer owns those Golden Age properties. It's been bought and sold so many times that the catalog is indeed slim and only goes back the the mid-'80s if I recall correctly. The James Bond franchise is older than that but originally belonged to United Artists and is MGM's today only because the latter acquired UA at one point during the Kerkorian era. "The Magnificent Seven" (1960) was a UA picture as well. The classic MGM movies from the Golden Age went to Ted Turner long ago and then to Warner Bros. while the fabled Culver City studio went to Lorimar and then Sony, its backlots having been razed and replaced by housing developments. Meanwhile, the old Selznick lot up the street where GWTW was made (originally a Selznick-International picture distributed by MGM's then-parent Loew's Inc. but later acquired by the old MGM) is being redeveloped into Amazon Studios."
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