Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc. (also known as Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures or MGM) is an American film production studio founded in 1924. It is currently a label within Amazon Studios' Motion Picture Group, and is headquartered in Beverly Hills, California.

MGM was formed by Marcus Loew by combining Metro Pictures, Goldwyn Pictures, and Louis B. Mayer Pictures into a single company. It hired a number of well known actors as contract players—its slogan was "more stars than there are in heaven"—and soon became one of Hollywood's "big five" film studios, producing popular movie musicals and winning many Oscars. The company also owned film studios, movie lots, movie theaters and technical production facilities. Its most prosperous era, from 1926 to 1959, was bracketed by two productions of Ben Hur. After that, it divested itself of the Loews movie theater chain, and,  in the 1960s, it diversified into television production.

In 1969, Kirk Kerkorian bought 40% of MGM, hired new management, reduced its output to about five movies per year, and diversified its products, creating MGM Resorts International and, in 1973, a Las Vegas-based hotel and casino company (which it divested in the 1980s). In 1980, it acquired United Artists. In 1986, Kerkorian sold the entire company to Ted Turner. Turner kept the rights to the MGM library in Turner Entertainment, sold the studio lot in Culver City to Lorimar, and sold back the remnant of MGM to Kerkorian who then sold it again in 1992, only to buy it again a third time in 1996. After that he expanded MGM by purchasing Orion Pictures and the Samuel Goldwyn Company, including both of their film libraries. Finally, in 2004, Kerkorian sold the company to a consortium that included Sony Pictures.

In 2010, MGM filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and reorganization. Later that year, after reorganization, MGM emerged from bankruptcy under the ownership of its creditors. Two former executives at Spyglass Entertainment, Gary Barber and Roger Birnbaum, became co-chairmen and co-CEOs of MGM's new holding company. In 2020, with Barber having left MGM, it began looking to be acquired by another company in order to pay its creditors. On May 26, 2021, it was announced that MGM would be acquired by Amazon for $8.45 billion. The merger was finalised on March 17, 2022.

In the present day, MGM is still producing and distributing feature films. Its major film productions include the Rocky and James Bond franchises. Until 2022, it also produced television programs, before its television arm was reformed as Amazon Studios Television.

Overview
MGM was the last studio to convert to sound pictures, but in spite of this fact, from the end of the silent film era through the late 1950s, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer was the dominant motion picture studio in Hollywood. Always slow to respond to the changing legal, economic, and demographic nature of the motion picture industry during the 1950s and 1960s, and although at times its films did well at the box office, the studio lost significant amounts of money throughout the 1960s. In 1966, MGM was sold to Canadian investor Edgar Bronfman Sr., whose son Edgar Jr. would later buy Universal Studios. Three years later, an increasingly unprofitable MGM was bought by Kirk Kerkorian, who slashed staff and production costs, forced the studio to produce low-budget fare, and then shut down theatrical distribution in 1973. The studio continued to produce five to six films a year that were released through other studios, mostly United Artists. Kerkorian did, however, commit to increased production and an expanded film library when he bought United Artists in 1981.

MGM ramped up internal production, as well as keeping production going at UA, which included the lucrative James Bond film franchise. It also incurred significant amounts of debt to increase production. The studio took on additional debt as a series of owners took charge in the 1980s and early 1990s. In 1986, Ted Turner bought MGM, but a few months later, sold the company back to Kerkorian to recoup massive debt, while keeping the library assets for himself. The series of deals left MGM even more heavily in debt. MGM was bought by Pathé Communications (led by Italian publishing magnate Giancarlo Parretti) in 1990, but Parretti lost control of Pathé and defaulted on the loans used to purchase the studio. The French banking conglomerate Crédit Lyonnais, the studio's major creditor, then took control of MGM. Even more deeply in debt, MGM was purchased by a joint venture between Kerkorian, producer Frank Mancuso, and Australia's Seven Network in 1996.

The debt load from these and subsequent business deals negatively affected MGM's ability to survive as a separate motion picture studio. After a bidding war which included Time Warner (the current parent of Turner Broadcasting) and General Electric, MGM was acquired on September 23, 2004, by a partnership consisting of Sony Corporation of America, Comcast, Texas Pacific Group (now TPG Capital, L.P.), Providence Equity Partners, and other investors.

Founding and early years
In 1924, movie theater magnate Marcus Loew had a problem: He had bought Metro Pictures Corporation in 1919 for $3 million, to provide a steady supply of films for his large Loew's Theatres chain. However, he found that his new property only provided a lackluster assortment of films. Seeking to solve this problem, Loew purchased Goldwyn Pictures in 1924 for $5 million to improve the quality of the theatres' products. However, these purchases created a need for someone to oversee his new Hollywood operations, since longtime assistant Nicholas Schenck was needed in New York headquarters to oversee the 150 theaters. Approached by Louis B. Mayer, Loew addressed the situation by buying Louis B. Mayer Pictures for $75,000. Loews Incorporated completed the merger of the Loews theater chain, Metro's distribution network, Goldwyn Pictures studio and Louis B. Mayer Productions on April 17, 1924, celebrated with a fete on April 26, 1924. Mayer became head of the renamed Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, with 24-year-old Irving Thalberg as head of production. Final approval over budgets and contracts rested with New York City-based Loews Inc., while production decisions rested with the production headquarters in Culver City.

MGM produced more than 100 feature films in its first two years. In 1925, MGM released the extravagant and successful Ben-Hur, taking a $4.7 million profit that year, its first full year. Also in 1925, MGM, Paramount Pictures and UFA formed a joint German distributor, Parufamet.

Marcus Loew died in 1927, and control of Loew's passed to Nicholas Schenck. In 1929, William Fox of Fox Film Corporation bought the Loew family's holdings with Schenck's assent. Mayer and Thalberg disagreed with the decision. Mayer was active in the California Republican Party and used his political connections to persuade the Justice Department to delay final approval of the deal on antitrust grounds. During this time, in the summer of 1929, Fox was badly hurt in an automobile accident. By the time he recovered, the stock market crash in the fall of 1929 had nearly wiped Fox out and ended any chance of the Loew's merger going through. Schenck and Mayer had never gotten along (Mayer reportedly referred to his boss as "Mr. Skunk"), and the abortive Fox merger increased the animosity between the two men.

Headquarters
Since August 22, 2011, its headquarters have been in Beverly Hills, California. MGM rents space in a six-story office building. The 144000 sqft facility was originally constructed for the venerable William Morris talent agency, but had remained all but unoccupied until MGM's move because of the agency's merger with Endeavor Talent Agency in April 2009. MGM planned to house a private theater and a private outdoor patio in the building.

Prior to 2003, its headquarters had been in the Colorado Center in Santa Monica, California, occupying at least 150000 sqft of space there. In 2000 MGM announced that it was moving its headquarters to a new building in Century City that was to be the first high-rise in Los Angeles to be completed in the 21st century. Upon the company's agreement to be its lead tenant halfway through the design building process, the structure became identified as the MGM Tower, opening in 2003. When MGM moved into the lavishly appointed spaces devised by Alex Yemenidjian, former chairperson and chief executive of MGM, Roger Vincent and Claudia Eller observed in the Los Angeles Times that "Yemenidjian spared no expense in building out the studio's space with such Las Vegas-style flourishes as towering marble pillars and a grand spiral staircase lined with a wall of awards."

Scott Johnson, the architect, designed the bottom third of the tower with extra-large floors so MGM executives could have outdoor decks. Seemingly no expense was spared, from the marble imported from Italy for MGM's area to the company's exclusive use of a dedicated private garage, security checkpoint, and elevator bank: all to enable celebrities who visited the complex discreet entry and exit, bypassing public spaces. One of three screening rooms placed in the tower was a 100-seat theater on the ground floor (later taken over by International Creative Management in December 2010). The 14th floor lobby housed the executive suites and a wall of Oscar statuettes for Academy Award-winning films. The street leading to the building's garage was renamed MGM Drive and a large MGM logo, illuminated at night, crowned the top of the building. As of December 2010, MGM rented 200000 sqft of space in the MGM Tower at a cost of almost $5 per square foot per month.

Emerging from bankruptcy protection in 2010, MGM announced that it planned to relocate the headquarters to Beverly Hills as part of an effort toward removing almost $5 billion in debt since the lease in Century City was not scheduled to expire until 2018. Vincent and Eller said that MGM's per square foot monthly rent would be far lower in the Beverly Hills building than in the MGM Tower. Larry Kozmont, a real estate consultant not involved in the process, said "It's a prudent move for them. Downsizing and relocating to a space that is still prominent but not overly ostentatious and burdened by expenses is fundamental for their survival." MGM vacated its namesake tower on August 19, 2011.

Leo logo and mottos
The studio's official motto, "Ars Gratia Artis", is a Latin phrase meaning "Art for art's sake". It was chosen by Howard Dietz, the studio's chief publicist. The studio's logo is a roaring lion surrounded by a ring of film inscribed with the studio's motto. The logo, which features Leo the Lion, was created by Dietz in 1916 for Goldwyn Pictures and updated in 1924 for MGM's use. Dietz based the logo on his alma mater's mascot, the Columbia University lion. Originally silent, the sound of Leo the Lion's roar was added to films for the first time in August 1928.

In the 1930s and 1940s, the studio billed itself as having "more stars than there are in heaven", a reference to the large number of A-list movie stars under contract to the company. This second motto was also coined by Dietz and was first used in 1932.

On March 8, 2021, the studio unveiled a rebrand centered on the "Ars Gratia Artis" motto across its social media and marketing platforms and a photorealistic CGI version of its Leo the Lion emblem and logo.

Turner Entertainment Co.
Following his brief ownership of the company in 1986, Ted Turner formed Turner Entertainment Co. as a holding company for the pre-May 1986 MGM film and television library and pre-1950 Warner Bros. film library which he retained. For several years after the sale, MGM continued to distribute home video releases of those films under license from Turner, though in 1990 it sold all of its home video distribution rights to Warner Bros. After Turner's holdings were purchased by Time Warner in 1996, the rights for the Turner-owned films were reassigned to Warner Home Video in 1999 when MGM ended their distribution deal with Warner Bros, though Turner Entertainment, as a subsidiary of WarnerMedia, remains the credited copyright holder.

Distribution
Since 2022, MGM's films are currently distributed globally by Amazon Studios Distribution, previously known as United Artists Releasing, the former Mirror Releasing.

From 1924 to 1973 (worldwide) and 1981 to 2010 (domestically), MGM has theatrically distributed most of its movies entirely in-house, as well as those of United Artists after July 1981 and Orion Pictures after April 1997. In October 2017, seven years after shutting down their major distribution operations, MGM re-entered US threatrical distribution by launching an American joint venture with Annapurna Pictures that will share distribution financing between the two companies and release certain MGM and Annapurna films, beginning with the 2018 remake of Death Wish.

There were also periods when they outsourced distribution to other companies. From 1973 to 1981, United Artists released its films in North America while Cinema International Corporation released them overseas. In 1981, United Artists' international arm was combined by CIC to form United International Pictures. MGM's arrangement with that company lasted until 2000, when it made an arrangement with 20th Century Fox for international distribution. From 2005 to 2016, the Columbia TriStar Motion Picture Group has distributed certain films. From 2006 to 2010, Alliance Films handled Canadian distribution of some of its products.

They also distributed films from Carolco Pictures(1994- 1995, in North America), Polygram Rysher Entertainment (1996-1997), and The Weinstein Company/Dimension Films (2006-2008, in the United States), as well as currently handling select international distribution of Annapurna Pictures' releases.

From 2006 to September 2008, MGM distributed The Weinstein Company's (TWC) film. Weinstein preferred the deal brought carriage on Showtime. Prints and marketing were paid for by TWC, while MGM was paid for booking theaters. With TWC agreed to a direct deal with Showtime and MGM not intending to renew the distribution deal, TWC and MGM agreed to ended the distribution deal three month early in September 2008.

Other international arrangements
In 2012, MGM signed a deal with Forum Film to release its films in Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and Israel; Forum Film has also been known to release some of MGM's films in Czech Republic/Slovakia. That same year, in Denmark, Sweden and Norway, MGM arranged to get its films distributed through AB Svensk Filmindustri, which was renamed to SF Studios in 2016. Also in 2012, it arranged to have its films distributed by FS Film (now SF Film Finland) to release its films in Finland and with ZON Lusomundo (now NOS Audiovisuais) to release its films in Portugal.

In 2018, for select films, MGM made international distribution deals with Entertainment One (for the Canadian market), Vertigo Releasing (for the UK market), Rialto Distribution (for the Australian market), Ascot Elite Entertainment Group (for the Swiss market), BF Distribution (for the Argentinean market), Dutch FilmWorks (for the Dutch market), Kinepolis Film Distribution (for the Belgian film market), Odeon (for the Greek market), OctoArts Films (for the Filipino market), Universum Film (for the German market), Filmax International (for the Spanish market), Hollywood International Film Exchange/Big Screen Entertainment Group (for the Chinese market), Shaw Organisation (for the Singaporean market), and Showgate (for the Japanese market). Paramount Pictures distributed the 2018 remake of Death Wish for the French market.