Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc. (also known as Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures, commonly referred to as Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, or is commonly shortened to MGM or MGM Pictures) is an American film and television production and distribution company headquartered in Culver City, California. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer was founded on April 17, 1924, and has been owned by the Amazon MGM Studios subsidiary of Amazon since 2022.
MGM was formed by Marcus Loew by combining Metro Pictures, Goldwyn Pictures, and Louis B. Mayer Pictures into one 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 Hollywood's most prestigious filmmaking company, producing popular musical films and winning many Academy Awards. MGM 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. It divested itself of the Loews movie theater chain and, in 1956, expanded into television production.
In 1969, businessman and investor Kirk Kerkorian bought 40% of MGM and dramatically changed the operation and direction of the studio. He hired new management, reduced the studio's output to about five films per year, and diversified its products, creating MGM Resorts International as a Las Vegas–based hotel and casino company. In 1980, Kerkorian split MGM into two separate companies to focus on its hotels and resorts. The studio was rebranded as Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Film Co., and in 1981, acquired United Artists (UA). In 1986, Kerkorian sold MGM/UA to Ted Turner, who retained the rights to the MGM film library, sold the studio lot in Culver City to Lorimar, and sold the remnants of MGM back to Kerkorian a few months later. After Kerkorian sold and reacquired the company again in the 1990s, he expanded MGM by purchasing Orion Pictures and the Samuel Goldwyn Company, including both of their film libraries. Finally in 2005, Kerkorian sold MGM to a consortium that included Sony Pictures.
MGM was listed on the New York Stock Exchange until 1986 when it was sold to Turner. The company had its third IPO on the same exchange in 1997.
In 2010, MGM filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and reorganization. After reorganization, it emerged from bankruptcy later that year under its creditors' ownership. Two former executives at Spyglass Entertainment, Gary Barber and Roger Birnbaum, became co-chairmen and co-CEOs of MGM's new holding company. After Barber's departure in 2018, the studio sought to be acquired by another company to pay its creditors. In May 2021, Amazon acquired MGM for ; the deal closed in March 2022. In October 2023, Amazon Studios absorbed MGM Holdings and rebranded itself as Amazon MGM Studios.
The most commercially successful film franchises from MGM include James Bond, Rocky, The Pink Panther, Poltergeist, RoboCop, Hannibal Lecter, and The Hobbit trilogy. Additionally, the studio's library includes many notable films such as Gone with the Wind, Ben-Hur, Rain Man, A Star is Born, and Licorice Pizza, with all five films being nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture (with Gone with the Wind, Ben-Hur, and Rain Man winning Best Picture), and all of them became among the highest grossing films of all time.
As a subsidiary of Amazon MGM Studios, MGM is a member of the Motion Picture Association (MPA); it was a founding member before leaving in the 2005 Sony acquisition.
Overview
MGM was the last studio to convert to sound pictures—nonetheless, from the end of the silent film era through the late 1950s, it was the dominant motion picture studio in Hollywood. It was slow to respond to the changing legal, economic, and demographic nature of the motion picture industry during the 1950s and 1960s; and although its films often did well at the box office, it 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-quality, low-budget fare, and then ceased theatrical distribution in 1973. The studio continued to produce five to six films a year that were distributed through other studios, usually United Artists (UA). Kerkorian did, however, commit to increased production and an expanded film library when he bought UA in 1981.
MGM ramped up internal production, and kept production going at UA, which was continuing to thrive, particularly with 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 an independent motion picture studio. After a bidding war which included Time Warner (the current parent of Turner Broadcasting) and General Electric (the owners of the NBC television network at the time), 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.
After its bankruptcy in 2010, MGM reorganized, with its creditors' $4 billion debt transferred to ownership. MGM's creditors controlled MGM through MGM Holdings, a private company. New management of its film and television production divisions was installed.
History
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 films shown in his theaters. Loew acquired the Goldwyn studio, including its Culver City studio lot, its Leo the Lion "Ars Gratia Artis" slogan and its contracted stars and projects, after negotiations with its president, Frank Joseph Godsol, as Samuel Goldwyn had lost control of the company bearing his name that he had formed in 1922. Goldwyn reluctantly sold his remaining interest in Goldwyn Pictures to Loew for $1 million.
However, these purchases created a need for someone to oversee his new Hollywood operations, since longtime assistant Nicholas Schenck was needed at New York headquarters to oversee the 150 theaters. A solution came with Louis B. Mayer, head of Louis B. Mayer Pictures. Loew bought the Mayer studio for $75,000. Loews Incorporated completed the merger of its theater chain and the three studios 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. Translation
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. In the summer of 1929, Fox was seriously injured in an automobile accident. By the time that he recovered, the stock-market crash in the fall of 1929 had nearly bankrupted Fox and ended any chance of the Loew's merger. Schenck and Mayer had an acrimonious relationship (Mayer reportedly referred to Schenck as "Mr. Skunk"), and the abortive Fox merger increased the animosity.
1920s
From the outset, MGM capitalized on filmgoers' desire for glamour and sophistication. Having inherited few big names from their predecessor companies, Mayer and Thalberg began at once to create and publicize a host of new stars, among them Joan Crawford, Greta Garbo, John Gilbert, William Haines and Norma Shearer (who followed Thalberg from Universal and eventually married him). Established names such as Wallace Beery, Lon Chaney, Buster Keaton, and William Powell were hired from other studios. They also hired top directors such as Clarence Brown, Tod Browning, Victor Seastrom, King Vidor and Erich von Stroheim. The arrival of talking pictures in 1928–29 afforded opportunities to other new stars, many of whom would carry MGM through the 1930s, such as Clark Gable, Nelson Eddy, Jean Harlow, Myrna Loy, Jeanette MacDonald (often paired with Eddy), Robert Montgomery, Robert Taylor and Spencer Tracy.
MGM was among the first studios to experiment with filming in Technicolor. Using the two-color Technicolor process, MGM filmed portions of The Uninvited Guest (1924), The Big Parade (1925) and Ben-Hur (1925) in the process. MGM released The Viking (1928), the first complete Technicolor feature with a synchronized score and sound effects, but with no spoken dialogue.
With the arrival of sound film, MGM moved slowly and reluctantly into the new era, releasing features such as White Shadows in the South Seas (1928) with music and sound effects and Alias Jimmy Valentine (1928) with limited dialogue sequences. The studio's first full-fledged talkie, the musical The Broadway Melody (1929), was a box-office success and won the Academy Award for Best Picture.
1930s
MGM was the last major studio to convert to sound. The studio's first all-color, "all-talking" sound feature with dialogue was the musical The Rogue Song in 1930. MGM included a sequence shot in Technicolor's superior new three-color process, a musical number in the otherwise black-and-white The Cat and the Fiddle (1934), starring Jeanette MacDonald and Ramon Novarro. The studio then produced a number of three-color short subjects, including the musical La Fiesta de Santa Barbara (1935). Its first complete Technicolor feature was Sweethearts (1938) with MacDonald and Nelson Eddy, the earlier of the popular singing team's two films in color. After that point, MGM regularly produced several Technicolor films per year, with Northwest Passage (1939) perhaps one of the most notable of the era.