Amazon has paid roughly $8.5 billion for MGM, the Hollywood company behind the James Bond and Rocky films, as the struggle for global streaming supremacy heats up.
The deal’s size dwarfs the $5 billion (£3.5 billion) price tag estimated when the studio placed itself up for sale in December, as vicious bidding battles for must-see content feed fierce bidding battles for owners of more scarce assets.
Apple and Comcast, the owner of Sky, were also interested in MGM. Both, though, were turned off by the size of the check Amazon was willing to write.
The famous studio has a library of 4,000 film titles and 17,000 hours of TV programming – ranging from Gone with the Wind and The Hobbit to TV hits such as The Handmaid’s Tale – that has collectively won more than 180 Academy Awards and 100 Emmy Awards.
Founded in 1924, MGM (originally known as Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) recorded huge success throughout the golden age of Hollywood with films ranging from The Wizard of Oz and Ben Hur to Raging Bull, Basic Instinct, and The Silence of the Lambs. It has changed hands frequently and previous owners have included the drinks magnate Edgar Bronfman, the Las Vegas casino billionaire Kirk Kerkorian, and CNN’s founder, Ted Turner.
It is Amazon’s second-largest takeover deal ever, with 175 million global subscribers, making it the world’s second-largest streaming service. It spent $13.7 billion for Whole Foods Market in the United States in 2017.
“The true financial value of this transaction is the vast amount of intellectual property in the deep catalog that we plan to rethink and expand with MGM’s excellent team,” Mike stated.
Bond is the fifth most valuable movie franchise of all time, with its 24 films to date grossing more than $7 billion, behind only the sprawling Marvel Cinematic Universe, Star Wars, Harry Potter, and Spider-Man films.
Disney’s $66bn acquisition of the Fox assets gave the world’s largest media company the extra content muscle to successfully join the streaming wars with the launch of Disney+.
