Rebirth of England.

On November 11, before the latest 15 film "Casino Royale" was released in North America, Blue Valley Capital finally partnered with Providence Equity Partners, Texas Pacific Capital Funds and DLJ Merchandising Banking Partners. The remaining shareholders within MGM Holdings reached an agreement.

Blue Valley Capital will acquire the remaining 15% of MGM Holdings shares held by their three investment institutions for US$60 billion, thereby acquiring MGM Pictures.

The reason why the acquisition of MGM Pictures can be completed at this time is that the process is not that simple.

In addition to being in acquisition negotiations with these three investment institutions, American Express Bank also acquired US$10 billion of MGM Pictures debt during this period.

Yes, last month, Standard Chartered Bank just acquired American Express Bank for $8.5 million to expand its private banking business.

Speaking of American Express, many people have heard of it. For example, the most famous American Express Centurion Black Card can be said to be the standard for many wealthy people.

But in fact, what Standard Chartered Bank acquired this time was only the American Express banking business of American Express Company, and did not include its card and travel businesses.

Founded in 1850, American Express is a diversified global travel, financial and network services company and the world's largest travel management company.

American Express has more than 84000 employees and more than 1700 travel offices around the world, providing debit and credit cards, travelers checks, travel, financial planning, investment products, insurance and international banking services.

At the same time, the transaction will provide a strong impetus for the development of Standard Chartered Bank's private banking business - this acquisition will shorten the development plan of Standard Chartered Bank's private banking business by 2 to 3 years.

And now, its debts have reached US$22 billion. These debts have left MGM Pictures with nearly a hundred creditors...

American Express has one of the largest international branch networks among U.S.-based banks, with agent banking operations in 47 countries, including servicing banks that do not have local operations and private banking services.

After acquiring US$10 billion of the debt, American Express Bank, a subsidiary of Standard Chartered Bank, became MGM Pictures' largest creditor. Holding these debts in American Express Bank threatened MGM Pictures with bankruptcy. One of the main reasons why the three investment institutions finally decided to sell their shares to Blue Valley Capital.

Express Company has three major branches -

They are American Express Travel Related Services, American Express Financial Consultants and American Express Bank.

As mentioned before, when a consortium headed by Sony acquired MGM Pictures in 2005, MGM Pictures already had US$20 billion in debt.

This time, Standard Chartered Bank's acquisition of American Express Bank will double the scale of its U.S. dollar settlement business and will also enable the entire Standard Chartered Bank to have direct euro and Japanese yen settlement operations.

After all, the box office performance of the movie "007: Casino Royale" is still unknown, but now MGM Pictures' huge debt has become a real threat - MGM Pictures has begun to "go bad" and almost gave up. Except for the production of all other films in the 007 series and the Pink Panther series, this once one of the top eight companies does not see any signs of improvement.

What's more, even if "007: Casino Royale" can perform well, it is just a movie after all. It is impossible to say that the entire film company can continue to rely on this movie alone. Is it possible to release a movie every year? A 007 movie?

However, Barron knows that the box office of "Casino Royale", which will be released first in North America on November 11, is really good - it will be the highest-grossing 17 movie so far.

It's just that the production of this movie also involved the participation of Sony's Glenn Graduation Pictures, and the distribution is also attributed to Sony Pictures...



The box office share that MGM Pictures can get from this movie will not be too high.

But this is at least a good start for a new era for MGM Pictures.

After completing the acquisition of MGM Pictures, Blue Valley Capital announced the merger of the three companies they acquired, including MGM Pictures, Marvel Entertainment and Summit Entertainment, to form Marvel-MGM Group .

In this way, under the Marvel-MGM Group, there will be three film and television production companies: MGM Pictures, Marvel Pictures and Summit Entertainment.

Marvel-MGM Group has also received a US$5 million loan financing from Standard Chartered Bank. In addition to "Iron Man" and the first "Twilight" of the "Twilight Saga" currently in progress, it will also provide Marvel Studios with GM Pictures launches new projects "Rocky" and "The Hobbit".

"Rocky" was a well-known film series from MGM, starring Stallone. However, after the release of "Rocky 1990" in 5, the series was frozen due to poor reputation and a disastrous box office failure.

However, this series is still very well-known in the United States, and Barron knew that the box office performance of the later "Rocky 6" was also good, so he decided to restart the Rocky series and launch this series in the next year or two. The sixth part.

As for "The Hobbit", it was jointly launched by MGM and Warner Pictures in the original time and space. MGM owns half of the copyright of the prequel story of "The Lord of the Rings", and it will become a very successful series in the future, and can Get extremely high returns.

In Barron's previous life, because MGM Pictures was facing bankruptcy at the time, although "The Hobbit" was still jointly produced by them and Warner Pictures, the film was distributed by Warner instead of MGM. .

Now they will definitely not let this happen again, and not only that, Marvel-MGM Group will also try to acquire New Line from Warner Pictures to obtain the complete rights to "The Hobbit".

As we all know, New Line has achieved great success due to the successful launch of the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy.

But it is precisely because of the success of the "Lord of the Rings" series that New Line has become path dependent, and it still believes that fantasy movies similar to "The Lord of the Rings" will continue to be successful.

Therefore, after the release of the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy three years ago, New Line continued to invest heavily in producing a series of fantasy movies, but it turned out that these movies did not receive the same success as the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy. The mediocre results caused New Line to continue to suffer losses.

Originally, although New Line was nominally owned by Warner, it was extremely independent and had independent production and distribution rights.

But because of this continued loss, Warner eventually decided to merge with New Line and conduct massive layoffs. Even the two founders of New Line also left. It can be said that New Line has withdrawn from the stage of history.

And the film production of "The Hobbit" was also quite bumpy. Initially, New Line acquired the film and television rights to the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy and "The Hobbit", but it succeeded in the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy. After that, the launch of "The Hobbit" was constantly delayed.

The reason is that the script and director of this movie cannot be determined. Peter Jackson, the director of the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy, refused to continue directing "The Hobbit". At this time, the market is not sure about the prospects of "The Hobbit". Not optimistic.

Even in the original work, "The Hobbit" is not like "The Lord of the Rings", there is only one, but New Line has the idea of ​​expanding one "The Hobbit" into a trilogy, which makes this movie Full of variables.