Amazon nears deal to buy MGM Studios for nearly $9 billion

CNBC/MSN ^ | 5-24-21 | Alex Sherman

[dynachrome]

TCM will probably have 5 minutes of woke BS explaining why you shouldn’t watch the racist, homophobe, trannyphobe, show you have booted up.

[Bernard]

Oh, they already do that. That's why the best way to watch TCM is record and watch later, so you can skip the nonsense.

I will give them credit though: I have not seen a movie on TCM that was censored or edited. They just apologize for it before the movie starts, and explain again when the movie is over.

[Bookshelf]

Top 10 Owners of MGM Resorts International
Stockholder Stake Total value ($)
The Vanguard Group, Inc. 8.14% 1,641,267,487
BlackRock Fund Advisors 3.98% 803,024,868
SSgA Funds Management, Inc. 3.34% 673,255,847
Corvex Management LP 3.17% 638,236,240
6 more rows

[White Lives Matter]

Bond will not be a black lesbian in the upcoming movie. Bond takes a break and M assigns the 007 number to her briefly until he reports back to duty.

[No_Mas_Obama]

MGM Resorts is casinos and hotels. This is MGM entertainment/movies. The movie company is privately held.

[No_Mas_Obama]

Yes but it’s the handful of remaining true (non-Fascist) leftists who are most opposed to business monopolies now...if Sleepy Joe approves this you WILL see knives out. Get your popcorn.

[a fool in paradise]

News report (1974) on Southwest Bell alerting customers that many are using illegally purchased store bought phones instead of renting (or buying) from the Bell company.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cknKqJ9koyA

[a fool in paradise]

They can also bury many films from the first half on the 20th century in the vault as politically incorrect and never let them see the light of day again.

[a fool in paradise]

MGM was busted up as a monopoly in the 1960s.

The game may have changed in the 70s even without the government interference but those type of films stopped being made (and MGM sold off their prop and wardrobe collection that made it cheaper to produce movies because you went and used what you have made for some other movie).

Even Roger Corman used another studio’s old sets when he made Masque of the Red Death in England (with Nicholas Roeg).

[lee martell]

The MGM of today is overpriced at Billions of dollars. They seem locked into making PC productions not many want to see.

[Zathras]

MGM wouldn’t be selling if they weren’t in financial trouble.

[a fool in paradise]

https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/the-day-the-supreme-court-killed-hollywoods-studio-system

The major studios had a near-monopoly on the movie business in the United States. Each studio had exclusive contracts with actors and directors; owned the theaters where their movies played; worked with each other to control how movies were shown in independent theaters; and, in some cases, owned the companies that processed the film.

The system of “vertical integration” was expensive to maintain, but it was lucrative when the movie business was booming.

Independent movie makers and theater owners started taking legal action decades before the 1948 Supreme Court ruling.

---

The Justice Department won the first round of the fight in 1930, when the Supreme Court ruled that the movies studios were monopolies. A key finding was that the process of “block booking” was illegal. In block booking, studios forced theaters to buy films as a group well in advance, and often without seeing them.

(NOTE: This still goes on with concert booking, movie booking, and in the 1990s when Clinton’s corrupt AF pal ran Marvel Comics in the distribution of publications (Marvel bought the top distributor as well and would only “guaranty” certain limited publications if a store bought EVERYTHING Marvel was stuffing in the channel).

[mewzilla]

For streaming services content is king.

Wanna knock down your churn rates?

Provide content folks will pay to watch.

Maybe Amazon wants to make their own rather than buy.

Good idea...as long as the content isn’t crap.

I watch very little of what Amazon puts out.

If they’re just going to be selling more of the same, meh.

Be interesting to see if Amazon starts putting some of its own content behind an additional pay wall.

[a fool in paradise]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Studio_system

[Mr. Jeeves]

No one is ever going to bust these trusts.

Certified Government Partners are never broken up. Before long, they’ll create a new Office of the Morale Conditioner post for Bezos to fill with a hand-picked stooge. :)

[a fool in paradise]

Hollywood has been one of the biggest lobbying organizations in DC for those 25+ years.

They’ve extended copyright, retroactively renewed copyright on expired works, sought government raids on bootleggers, and blocked attempts at user-selected (vs. bundled) cable tv packages.

And then there are the political “moral crusades” they push.

[a fool in paradise]

So it’s like the 1967 Casino Royale movie where everyone carries the 007 number to confuse the enemy?

[DoodleBob]

The govt's anti-trust powers are a concocted power never enumerated by the Founders. It's based on a bastardized interpretation of the Commerce Clause. If Big Business was a worry of the Founders, they'd have busted up the East India Trading US operations. They didn't, and anyone who considers themself a Constitutional conservative and wishes that the govt use it's "anti-trust power" is no different from a liberal claiming abortion is a Constitutionally-guaranteed right.

Besides...really...does any cogent conservative think the Justice Dept - peopled with DMV-like people - could capably break-up Amazon? Especially with Bidet as President*? I bet if they had a go at it, we'd find Amazon even STRONGER and BIGGER with a statuarory monopoly.

Remember, there is noting quite as intolerant as the Invisible Hand. Remember Netscape? IBM? GE? GM?

Firms become too lazy and ultimately like castles in the sand, fall in the sea, eventually.

I for one applaud this acquisition. Why? Because over the past 14 months a relatively large swath of America has gotten fed up with Hollywood, entertainment, the MSM, and Big Tech such that they aren't buying their stuff anymore. Oh, there's no protest...we are silently flipping them the bird and ignoring them. Indeed, the best way to get to a narcissist is to starve them of their supply of drama.

Let them throw $9bn down a rabbit hole. Let Amazon think it's some deity. Over time, they'll become like IBM...a has-been behemoth turned niche player. In the meantime, don't cancel your Amazon account...leave it dormant. Don't signal your position to the enemy. Be patient, and go support local and small business silently. Again, starve the narcissist of its supply and laugh as you watch it flail away like the end of Terminator 2, while cranking Hendrix. It's fun.

[1Old Pro]

Bond will not be a black lesbian in the upcoming movie. Bond takes a break

Daniel Craig's las movie as Bond, I think it's been in the can for a year now.

[a fool in paradise]

The founding fathers intended for copyright to be a limited term (which came to be 28 years with a 28 year extension). Now it is over 100 years. Long past the lifetime of anyone who had any hand in making the movie.

But the billion dollar studios sit on an endowment of such cultural history.

So they are monopolies because they changed the length of copyright numerous times and when it comes up again in 10-15 years they will extend it again because “it’s always been like this” and “too big to fail”.