Oxley Discusses Potential MGM Sale with The Wrap
Counsel Jamice Oxley discussed the news of a potential MGM sale with The Wrap. MGM's catalog is valued at an estimated $5.5 billion and includes the "James Bond" and "Rocky" film franchises and a library of approximately 4,000 film titles and 17,000 hours of TV programming. The package may be considered invaluable in today's streaming market. But is a viable sale eminent? According to The Wrap:
Jamice Oxley, a member of New York-based Pryor Cashman’s Intellectual Property, Media and Entertainment and Digital Media Groups, said MGM could be floating the idea of a sale mid-pandemic to “make some noise” that the studio remains a player among more high-profile competitors such as Disney+ and WarnerMedia, which recently rocked the movie world by announcing it would release all of its 2021 movies concurrently in theaters and on HBO Max. “When I saw (the MGM sale news) I thought, ‘What a distraction from the WarnerMedia noise, they are competing with the noise by saying they’re going to enter into sales talks again,’” Oxley said.
Oxley pointed to recent reports that MGM had talks to sell its upcoming Bond film “No Time to Die” to a streaming service, including Apple, Netflix and others, for a whopping $600 million.The movie, starting Daniel Craig as Bond, has been postponed multiple times due to coronavirus concerns, at a reported loss of $30 million to $50 million on a film with a budget of $250 million. It is now planned to open in theaters on April 2.
Oxley noted that MGM’s biggest shareholder is Anchorage Capital, a New York-based hedge fund that assumed control of the studio after it filed for bankruptcy in 2010. “These folks are completely thinking about the bottom line,” she said. “They’re not interested in the creative medium of filmmaking and production. They are just looking at the dollars.”
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