Next was Italian financier Giancarlo Parretti who bought MGM/UA for $1.3 billion in 1990, attracted by the United Artists film library, which includes the James Bond, Rocky and Pink Panther films, and a handful of recent hits including A Fish Called Wanda and Rain Man. He sold it all in 1986 to Ted Turner for $1.5 billion and bought back the company, minus the library of 2,200 gems including Oz, for $300 million. Kerkorian first snagged MGM in 1969 by outmaneuvering the Bronfman family, eventually merging it with another legendary studio, United Artists. Mayer were long gone and even the studio’s last notable footprint - a high-profile skyscraper in Century City - had been ditched for smaller space near Rodeo Drive. By the time the billionaire raider took over, the swashbuckling days of Louis B. Its roaring studio mascot, Leo the Lion, reigned as king of the Hollywood jungle. In its heyday, from the 1920s through the early 1950s, MGM produced a string best picture nominees every year for two straight decades. MGM, for its part, declined comment on reports that it’s exploring a sale. Wilson, who maintain an iron grip over the Bond franchise - a deal initially hammered out decades ago by Broccoli’s father, producer Albert “Cubby” Broccoli - have the final say over casting decisions, dialog and promotional materials related to 007 - adding complexity to any deal talks. Barbara Broccoli and her half brother Michael G. The problem is that MGM’s collection of great movies is dated and losing value by the minute. Others floated as potential buyers - Comcast’s NBCUniversal and AT&T’s WarnerMedia - are little more than fantasy at this point, though Apple remains a speculative wild-card. Spokespeople for Amazon and Sloan’s Eagle Equity Partners declined comment. He and business partner Jeff Sagansky, are raising $1.5 billion for their seventh special purpose investment vehicle - an evaluating potential targets. Potential buyers are said to include Mike Hopkins, senior vice president of Amazon Prime Video and Amazon Studios, who has held “exploratory talks.” MGM’s former CEO, Harry Sloan is in there too. Scoffed one movie biz insider: “Oh please, it’s been for sale for 100 years.” Hopes of fetching the lofty $10 billion price tag Ulrich’s investors are reportedly seeking are rapidly fading. And burgeoning streaming services like the Walt Disney Co.’s Disney+ and WarnerMedia’s HBO Max are increasingly relying on their own in-house production capabilities, notes one industry attorney, who says it will become increasingly harder for independent content “arms dealers” to survive. The problem? Outside of the upcoming Bond sequel, No Time to Die, the studio that once boasted “more stars than are in the heavens” has a library of films franchises, like The Pink Panther and Rocky, that are showing their age. It’s possible that the studio attracts an outsider, another in what veteran media analyst Hal Vogel calls a “long conga line of buyers,” including Ulrich, who have been seduced by their fascinations with the movie business. Greif says that if the stars aligned and competing streaming services decide to battle for control of the MGM library, it could sell for as much as $9 billion.
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