Saying that the industry can't keep up with the publics' appetite for new movie content, Chairman Harry Sloan told reporters that Wall Street investors are lining up to pay for the upcoming projects.
Sloan said that with their top movie franchises like The Pink Panther, The Terminator, James Bond and The Hobbit, now is the time to put together a fund to produce the sequels.
Sloan added that it would cost between $60 million and $150 million to make each of the movies and "is a big enough number to merit bringing in outside investors and outside financing."
Those cost figures are somewhat surprising to me in how hight they are, but probably with the films mentioned, other than The Pink Panther, those may be pretty accurate. Although many studios are going in the other direction with concentrating on a lot more films in the $20 to $30 million range, with the occasional high-cost budgeted film.
"Given the demand for new content and that so much money is available to fund it, we will continue to create and arrange funding for independent entities," Sloan said. "The strategies for MGM to be mainly a distributor for independently made movies is our strategy."
He's right about one thing, even in a climate where a lot of movies have been losing money, the amount of money being made available is huge.
At this time he also said that they will continue to fund the newly resuscitated United Artists, where Tom Cruise and partner Paula Wagner are working on a current project "Lions for Lambs," which MGM financed.
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