Bezos, Jeff Bezos Meets Bond, James Bond – Reconfiguring the Media Landscape Part 1

Huge transitions and consolidations are happening in the media business right now as the COVID pandemic winds down.  We’re going to take a look at a number of these changes over the next week or so.

Today we start with Amazon buying out legacy movie studio MGM – home of the James Bond franchise.

eCommerce giant and streaming provider Amazon agreed to buy the MGM legacy movie studio for $8.45 billion. The studio has been around for nearly 100 years and is known for movies such as the Rocky/Creed franchise, Ridley Scott’s feminist road movie Thelma and Louise, but most of all for the more than 40 James Bond movies.

(What about classics such as The Wizard of Oz, Signin’ in the Rain, and Gone with the Wind? Those still belong to WarnerMedia as part of a previous round of consolidation decades ago. What? you don’t remember when Ted Turner was the head of Turner Broadcasting and bought up MGM for their film library, and then was forced to sell off the studio to keep his rapidly growing company out of bankruptcy, right before he was forced to sell out to Time Warner? But don’t worry – MGM as acquired by Amazon still has a library of more than 4,000 movies.)

The purchase is the second largest in Amazon’s history, second only to their $13.7 billion purchase of Whole Foods grocery stores in 2017.

Tech giants Amazon and Apple have both been seen as likely buyers of legacy media companies that are perceived as being too small to compete in the new streaming-centric media world.

The purchase of MGM will give Amazon Prime video a deep library of content for its streaming service as well as a well-regarded production studio. Amazon has traditionally primarily focused on producing movies and TV shows exclusively for streaming. It will be interesting to see whether they will continue to place MGM movies into theaters.

Amazon’s offer of $8.45 billion was approximately 40 precent more than other possible buyers thought the studio was worth. Amazon does, of course, have the money, with more than $71 billion in cash on hand and a market capitalization value of $1.64 trillion.

Twitterati are making a big deal out of the fact that the first big movie to come out of MGM under the Bezos era will be the long-delayed  new Bond movie, No Time To Die.  “They” have also been pointing out that Bezos looks like a Bond villain and might even talk like one:

I would close by noting that my favorite Bond movie villain is Jonathan Pryce’s Rupert Murdoch clone Elliot Carver from Tomorrow Never Dies who seeks to start a war so he has a great story to cover in his media empire.