Ted Turner owned MGM for barely three months, and kept the films
In 1986 Ted Turner bought MGM, found the debt crushing, and sold the studio back within months. What he held on to was the film library. Eight years later that hoard of old Hollywood became Turner Classic Movies, launched at the exact hundredth anniversary of America's first commercial movie screening.
Turner wanted programming for his Atlanta superstation WTBS, and after a failed bid for CBS he turned to MGM/UA, controlled by Kirk Kerkorian. Announced on August 7, 1985, the plan was to pay 1.5 billion dollars and immediately sell United Artists back to Kerkorian. Financing through Drexel Burnham Lambert's junk bonds proved difficult, and the price was cut twice, finally settling at about 1.25 billion dollars in January 1986. The merger closed on March 25, 1986.
It did not last. Turner Broadcasting was carrying some 2 billion dollars of debt, and analysts judged he had overpaid. By June he had agreed to return MGM to Kerkorian, and in August 1986 the production arm went to United Artists and the studio lot to Lorimar-Telepictures. Turner kept the pre-May 1986 MGM library, along with RKO titles and Warner Bros. films from before 1950, and called the remainder Turner Entertainment Company.
Those films first ran on TNT, sometimes in colourised versions. Then, at 6 p.m. Eastern on April 14, 1994, Turner switched on TCM at a ceremony in Times Square. The opening film was Gone with the Wind, which had also launched TNT in 1988, and roughly 1 million cable subscribers could see it. Its rival, American Movie Classics, ran almost the same uncut, ad-free format until 2002, when AMC doubled its commercials and moved toward newer films. From then on TCM was the only film channel showing classics without breaks or edits.
The 1996 Time Warner merger opened up Warner's post-1950 catalogue. Ownership has shifted since, through AT&T's WarnerMedia to Warner Bros. Discovery. When executives were laid off in June 2023, Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg and Paul Thomas Anderson met CEO David Zaslav and publicly argued that the channel had always turned a profit.
Source: Turner Classic Movies
