Actor Daniel Craig plays James Bond, one of MGM's most valuable franchises.TIZIANA FABI / AFP
Leo, the famous cat from Metro Goldwyn Mayer (MGM) studios, is about to roar for Amazon.
The technology giant finalizes on Monday the final details of the purchase of one of the pillars of Hollywood since the silent era.
The nearly $ 9 billion transaction will herald a new era in the streaming market and follows the merger of content by AT&T, owner of Warner, with Discovery.
If the purchase is confirmed, advanced this Monday by
The Wall Street Journal
, Jeff Bezos' company will integrate to its Prime platform a powerful library of 4,000 titles that include two of the best valued franchises in the recent film industry, James Bond and Rocky, which has managed to continue the saga of Sylvester Stallone with Creed.
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MGMs have been expensive for Bezos.
The entertainment company was listed at $ 5.5 billion in December, but rumors of interest from the technology company, which was seeking to expand its offering to the 175 million subscribers on its digital platform, caused share prices to rise.
Only in recent weeks these went from 105 dollars to 140 this Monday, when the American newspaper published that the purchase was imminent.
It is the second most expensive transaction for Amazon after the acquisition of the organic supermarket chain WholeFoods in 2017.
The legendary studio, born in 1924 from the merger of the theater magnate Marcus Loew's company with Metro Pictures and Goldwyn, the famous producer Louis B. Mayer, has always been one of the most coveted pieces in the industry. The company had heard dozens of buyout and merger offers for decades. Kirk Kerkorian, the casino mogul and CEO of MGM, sold and repurchased it three times. He was also the one who brought United Artists into the studio in 1981, another piece of Hollywood history since it was created by Charles Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford and DW Griffith.
In the new millennium, Time Warner and Sony showed interest in MGM and came close to closing the deal in September 2004. Negotiations fell through because its price was deemed too high, more than $ 5 billion at the time. In 2018, CEO Gary Barber, another Hollywood veteran who took over from Kerkorian after his death in 2015, explored the possibility of selling Apple for $ 6 billion. Barber was fired by the board of investors for having entered the negotiations on his own and too early. Analysts believed that waiting a couple more years could have appreciated the value of the company above 8,000 million.
That time has come. At the end of 2020, the New York investment fund Anchorage Capital Group, the majority owner of the studios' shares, approached investment banks Morgan Stanley and LionTree with a message: they were ready to sell. The Culver City studio has more than 170 Oscars, 12 of them in the Best Picture category. MGM had become a drag on Anchorage, which had seen its revenues cut in a year where the pandemic forced it to delay film and television projects.
Metro, as it is popularly known, no longer owns many of the Hollywood classics that helped build its name.
Gone with the Wind and
The Wizard of Oz,
for example, are owned by WarnerMedia, in turn owned by AT&T. These films, along with hundreds of other pre-1948 titles, were bought by mogul Ted Turner to kick-start his cable channels programmed with classic cinema.
The Bond franchise, however, is one of the most valuable brands owned by MGM. The studios are co-owners of the rights together with a production company linked to the Broccoli family, creator of the British spy. The films have added a worldwide box office that exceeds 7,000 million dollars. Another asset that will come under the umbrella of Amazon is the franchise of eight boxer films from the Rocky Balboa and Adonis Creed saga, which have earned more than $ 1 billion.
On television, the company has also produced several recent hits, including the dystopian series
The
Handmaid's
Tale
, starring Emmy Award-winning Elisabeth Moss.
Fargo
, the television spin-off of the film by the brothers Joel and Ethan Coen, is also owned by MGM, along with the six-season drama Vikings, which will now seek a future from Jeff Bezos's Amazon in the new era golden of
streaming
.
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