MGM/UA Home Video story
The home media unit of the legendary Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer movie studio, a firm billed as having “more stars than there are in the heavens”, was established in 1979 as MGM Home Video. No cassettes were released under this name.
Instead, MGM had a meeting with CBS, who had operated a video unit, CBS Video Enterprises, since 1975. They teamed up for a partnership called MGM/CBS Home Video. The first releases under the name were released in October 1980; they were packaged in brown leather cases with gold lettering, but were later, as were all future releases, packaged in oversized gray cardboard cases that opened up like a book, a la Warner Home Video. MGM/CBS also distributed early Lorimar films as per the company’s deal with the network at the time; they later ported the Lorimar inventory over to CBS/Fox.
1981 was a big year for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. At the time, Heaven’s Gate was Hollywood’s biggest bomb and to that extent, MGM merged with the bankrupt studio who made that film, United Artists and formed MGM/UA Entertainment Co. CBS was very upset about the merger, and in 1982, CBS walked out of the video unit of MGM and the company was renamed MGM/UA Home Video. CBS shopped from studio to studio hoping to find a suitable partner to replace MGM now that that studio had a merger and ultimately found one in 20th Century Fox; hence, CBS/Fox Video was born. However, pre-1981 United Artists releases were licensed to CBS/Fox for a while due to a previous agreement between United Artists and Fox from back when the company was known as Magnetic Video. CBS/Fox lived until 2000, by which point CBS was itself merged, with Viacom; the relationship between CBS and Viacom dated back to when Viacom was known as CBS Films, and was the syndication unit of CBS.
In 1986, Ted Turner acquired the MGM library of films (up to May of that year) and MGM/UA signed a deal with Turner Entertainment to continue releasing the library on video. After some conflict into what part of the MGM library was owned by Turner; eventually, it was determined that Turner owned all of the pre-May 1986 MGM library, as well as the pre-1950 Warner Bros. catalog, the Popeye cartoons released by Paramount (both the pre-1950 WB library and Popeye cartoons were sold to Associated Artists Productions, which was later bought by United Artists), and the US/Canadian rights to the RKO library, in addition to MGM’s television series and even a TV show made by United Artists called Gilligan’s Island. Turner caused a major controversy in the movie world when he began “colorizing” many black and white classics (including a chunk of the black and white material previously owned by MGM/UA) for airing on his TV superstation WTBS-TV, channel 17 in Atlanta. After Kerkorian reclaimed MGM, the MGM/UA name continued to be utilized, but it changed its name to MGM/UA Communications Co., now using MGM and UA as separate brands. The rights of the fraction (a huge one) of MGM library that was owned by Turner have been in the hands of Warner Bros. since 1996, when the conglomerate acquired Ted Turner’s massive corporation.
In July 1988, Kirk Kerkorian announced plans to split MGM and UA into separate studios. Under this deal, Kerkorian, which owned 82% of MGM/UA Communications, was to sell 25% of MGM to Barris Industries (controlled by producers Burt Sugarman, Jon Peters, and Peter Guber). The proposition to spin-off MGM was called off a few weeks later.
In 1990, it was announced that MGM was to be purchased by Italian businessman Giancarlo Parretti. The French government had previously scuttled the bid Parretti made for Pathé because they were concerned about his character, background, and past dealings, but his purchase of MGM received backing from Crédit Lyonnais. Parretti’s way of financing the purchase was to have the company sign a distribution deal with Warner Home Video, a deal that ended in early 1999 (it was originally to end in 2003). Then he would merge the company with the Pathé Communications Corporation (formerly Cannon Group, a distributor that Parretti had renamed before his aborted bid for Pathé) to form MGM–Pathé Communications Co. But Parretti’s ownership of the new company proved short-lived as it dissolved in a flurry of lawsuits and a default by Crédit Lyonnais, and Parretti faced securities-fraud charges in the United States and Europe. Crédit Lyonnais then bought MGM back and restructured it under the newly regained name of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Inc., which was last used in 1980.
On April 11, 1997, MGM bought Metromedia’s film subsidiaries (Orion Pictures, The Samuel Goldwyn Company, and the Motion Picture Corporation of America) for $573 million, substantially enlarging its library of films and television series and acquiring additional production capacity. The deal was closed in July, and, subsequent to this, MGM purchased the pre-1996 PolyGram library, and (from StudioCanal) the distribution rights for many of the well-remembered Avco Embassy and Nelson Entertainment films, the films from the Hemdale Film Corporation, as well as films Rob Reiner’s company Castle Rock Entertainment made prior to 1994, lumping them all into the Metromedia film library, which, aside from the United Artists, Cannon, and post-1986 MGM films, is primarily what the MGM library is comprised of today.
In 1998, the company was renamed MGM Home Entertainment, which it is still called today, although the MGM/UA Home Video copyright screen continued to be seen at the beginning and end of tapes until they stopped releasing VHS tapes under their new name. The copyright screen began appearing in 1990 and featured the static MGM/UA Home Video logo. Because of the way Crédit Lyonnais had acquired control of the company, that firm soon put the studio up for sale, with the highest bidder being Kirk Kerkorian. Now the owner of MGM for the third time, Kerkorian sold a portion of the studio to Australia’s Seven Network. He was able to convince Wall Street that a revived MGM was worthy of a place on the stock market, where it languished until he sold the company to a group of hedge funds who had ties to Sony, which wanted to control the studio library to promote the Blu-ray Disc format. After the sale, their library was released through Sony Pictures Home Entertainment (the short list of titles Sony released from MGM include its last film on VHS, Into The Blue). A year later, MGM struck a new deal with 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment. The Fox deal, which MGM entered into internationally in 2000, went through two renewals and expired without a third renewal on June 30, 2020, by which point 20th Century Fox itself was acquired by the Walt Disney Company and renamed to 20th Century Studios. In the 2020 financial report, MGM named Warner Bros. Home Entertainment — then in the process of merging its home video arm with Universal’s to form Studio Distribution Services — as its new home media distributor, bringing the pre- and post-1986 MGM libraries under the same roof for the first time since 1999. On May 26, 2021, MGM announced that it was being sold to Amazon for some $8.45 billion, with the studio continuing to operate as a label under its new parent, but with questions arising for the studio’s physical media future. The sale was completed on March 17, 2022.
This would all seem to be the basic story for MGM/UA. The hard part comes in subsequent pages, where the task is to decipher a vast catalog which grew to include a mountainous portion of currently-and-long-out-of-print titles and involved deals and lines that came and went over the 25 years of MGM’s independence in the home video market. 20 will be covered on these pages, ending somewhere around 8499 in 2000, which is when MGM instituted a bumpy numbering sequence that started at 1000000 and kept on going until Sony bought out the studio in 2005. But even before 2000, the road of MGM/UA had plenty of bumps in it, and took on all sorts of crazy directions. The job done on these pages, then, is to pinpoint the track record of MGM between 1980 and 2000, and to provide the most comprehensive and accurate account of it that can be delivered to those who read the videography over the Internet. It is a tricky thing to do, but I hope I have done it well.
Here are the parts for it:
