MGM was born because a cinema owner needed better films for his theatres
Marcus Loew owned a huge chain of cinemas and a studio, Metro Pictures, that kept supplying him with dull films. In 1924 he bought Goldwyn Pictures and then Louis B. Mayer's small studio for just $75,000. The merged company, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, became the most prestigious studio in Hollywood.
The Goldwyn purchase brought the Culver City lot, the roaring Leo the Lion and the motto Ars Gratia Artis, although Samuel Goldwyn himself had already lost control of the company carrying his name. Mayer ran the new studio with a 24-year-old Irving Thalberg in charge of production, while Loew's head office in New York kept the purse strings. They made more than 100 features in two years, and the lavish Ben-Hur of 1925 helped deliver a $4.7 million profit in the first full year.
MGM built stars instead of inheriting them, promoting Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford and Norma Shearer, who married Thalberg, and later Clark Gable, Jean Harlow and Spencer Tracy, under the slogan more stars than there are in heaven. It was an early experimenter with Technicolor yet the last major studio to switch to sound, though its first full talkie, The Broadway Melody, won Best Picture. Its golden age ran from 1926 to 1959, framed by two versions of Ben-Hur. A 1929 takeover by William Fox collapsed after Fox was hurt in a car crash and the stock market crashed.
Decline set in during the 1960s. Kirk Kerkorian bought 40% in 1969, slashed output to around five films a year, stopped distributing its own films in 1973 and used the MGM name for a Las Vegas hotel and casino business. He bought United Artists, home of James Bond, in 1981, then sold the company to Ted Turner, who kept the film library and sold the rest back within months. Owners came and went, from an Italian financier who defaulted on his loans to a French bank and a Sony-led group, and debt piled up.
MGM went bankrupt in 2010, when creditors swapped $4 billion of debt for ownership. Amazon agreed to buy it for US$8.45 billion in May 2021, and it is now part of Amazon MGM Studios.
Source: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
