“Lion is no longer a cake”: one of the film studios is put up for sale again, but its price has almost halved

We are talking about the situation in which the legendary “MJM” found itself. We discuss the background, the current state of affairs of the company and the segment as a whole. Plus – we think about what to expect from continuing streaming wars and the upcoming movie theater relaunch this spring.

Photo: Jon Tyson.  Source: Unsplash.com
Photo: Jon Tyson. Source: Unsplash.com

What’s happening

Over the past few years, the largest media holdings have been actively fighting for an online audience. To strengthen their position in the market of Internet cinemas and streaming of films, TV series, documentaries and other entertainment shows, they are forced to merge, or come under the control of technology and telecom companies. Recent deals [AT&T покупает Time Warner, Sky Limited становится частью Comcast] – the best confirmation of this.

“M-G-M”, whose lions do not go from screens almost a century, it would seem, should have taken part in a similar deal a year ago. However, the funds that pulled the studio out of bankruptcy [4 миллиарда долларов долга на 2010 год] and rebuilt the lucrative film business without finding a buyer. There were rumors that in January 2020 there was a deal with Netflix or even Apple, but – according to experts – on the outcome of the negotiations influenced overvalued company assets. Then the owners estimated the studio at $ 10 billion.

At the end of this year, they had to cut this amount by almost half. Now she is just over five billion, which is still a huge but fair estimate of the MGM library. The studio owns more than seventeen thousand hours of well-known programs, TV shows and more than four thousand films, including “Gone With the Wind“,”The hobbit“And tapes about James Bond. The latter have already earned more than $ 7 billion in total, which puts them among the most profitable franchises in the history of the film industry – right behind the Marvel films, Star Wars, Harry Potter and Spider-Man.

What is it all for

Buying MJM could be a great investment in light of the upcoming 25th Bond movie release – “No time to die“. The world premiere will take place in the spring, and the audience, as always happens in such cases, will definitely want to revise a couple of previous “issues” of Bond. The surge of interest – in the wake of a new film about a well-known hero – can be successfully exploited by large streaming providers.

Photo: Legopicler click.  Source: Flickr.com
Photo: Legopicler click. Source: Flickr.com

Some of them can buy out the studio, and Bond can become a full-fledged participant in streaming wars and fall under a partial vendor lock. If this happens, the episode will be available in a single online movie theater, and third-party showcases will only show selected films.

However, do not forget about offline. Many people call “No Time to Die” a real prime mover for film distribution and associate colossal expectations with it for restarting cinemas after an unprecedented epidemiological crisis.

Previous collection of the film “007: Spectrum” made up about 900 million dollars, and Skyfall was able to bring more than 1.2 billion, which is an absolute record for the franchise, so the studio has no doubts about the potential of its long-awaited novelty.

Immediately after Bond on the big screen will show the next “Fast and the Furious” from Universal and Disney’s “Black Widow”, and then the new “Top Gun”, but it will be released only in the summer. By the way, Disney this year will focus on theatrical releases, and not on the development of its streaming platform, which would not be hampered by exclusive content. The fact is that the corporation plans to reduce losses from piracy activity, which became much more noticeable in terms of lost profits, as soon as the studio managed to release several successful online projects.

Among them – “The Mandalorian”, which fell on the first line of “victims” of piracy according to TorrentFreak, and Wonder Woman delayed up to 10% of torrent traffic on the day of release.

Photo: Joshua Rondeau.  Source: Unsplash.com
Photo: Joshua Rondeau. Source: Unsplash.com

Who knows, “MJM” may well become a good entry point into the cinema business for some of the technology companies – if there is one among potential buyers. Now this niche is in the deepest crisis, which means that it can easily be dragged into the confrontation between streaming platforms, which decide to take under their wing the depreciated assets of one or several movie theater chains.

Where will the studio end up, and the offline viewing of films [как некогда привычное для всех нас явление], the future will show, but for now – small content providers continue to rely on the intensive “buying activity” of IT giants. It seems that at the end of this year, the film market will continue to change its appearance in the most significant way, and we will only hope that all these changes will bring more quality films to viewers.


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