by NICHOLAS RUSSELL
Amazon’s purchase of MGM is a reminder that movies and shows are just commodities to be traded and hoarded
This week, Amazon acquired the hallowed movie studio MGM for a sum of $8.45bn, second in size to the company’s $13.4bn purchase of Whole Foods in 2017. The day before, the attorney general of Washington DC sued Amazon over antitrust concerns in the retail market; it joins attorneys general from California, New York, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Washington state who have also raised similar concerns. Chief executive Jeff Bezos, who is stepping down from the position in July, said in a statement: “MGM has a vast, deep catalogue of much beloved intellectual property. We can reimagine and develop that IP for the 21st century.”
It’s chilling, and unsurprising, that Bezos – a man who makes almost $3,000 a second; who makes a couple million dollars every 15 minutes; who, given that the sun is a little over 3bn miles away from Pluto, could travel there and back over 25 times and be paid $1 for each mile – sees a trove of cinematic history as IP to be exploited rather than an important, increasingly vulnerable facet of culture. Really, it’s a flippant and, by this point, almost stereotypical feature of writing about Bezos to try and make practical sense of his wealth. More difficult is trying to rationalize how that wealth has distorted his understanding of art and its role in society.
The purchase of MGM has so far mostly been written about in the context of the fate of the studio’s most notable productions: Gone With The Wind, The Wizard of Oz and the James Bond franchise, among other. This week, Variety published an article that was broken down into sections regarding various films and TV shows and what could become of them. Do some fall under the Amazon Prime umbrella? Do others belong to separate property holders due to previous contracts? Such speculation about the ownership of various movies and shows reduces everything down to numbers and titles, emphasizing the fact that these properties are indeed products. Not everything MGM owns is so culturally significant as to warrant pearl-clutching paranoia about its preservation. That’s not the point. And anyone concerned about how this deal tests antitrust laws when it comes to Amazon’s size and potential for monopoly will be disappointed given how small a portion of the film market MGM occupies. But that line of thought is also misleading. What’s consequential is the dilution of both quality and vitality for the cinematic form.
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