Will MGM get its growl back?

For the better part of the last decade, MGM has been a minor player in the movie business. It’s a studio that’s happily content to sit on the sidelines and distribute other companies’ movies (such is its current arrangement with The Weinstein Company), live off of the royalties from its vast film library of 4,000 titles (the world’s largest), and make the occasional flick that no one goes to see (Mr. Brooks, Van Wilder 2: The Rise of Taj). It sometimes scores big grosses from a little franchise called James Bond, enough to give it some street cred, but for the most part it’s a studio stuck in neutral.

However, with last week’s news that it hired former Universal Pictures executive Mary Parent as the new chairperson of the Worldwide Motion Picture Group, MGM is showing some signs that it’s getting serious again about making movies. Ms. Parent spent more than eight years with Universal and helped to produce some of that company’s biggest hits of late, including The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Matt Damon’s mega-successful Bourne trilogy.

I say, “Bring it.” I’ve always had something of a soft spot for the studio, and it’s been hard to watch it become such an inconsequential Hollywood player. Some of the most influential movies of my youth unspooled after the roar of that lion or the whoosh of the initials of its smaller sister studio, United Artists. Those would include the adventures of the aforementioned Mr. Bond, James Bond, and my favorite underdog slugger Rocky Balboa. It made one of the funniest movies ever, A Fish Called Wanda, and Get Shorty, the subject of one of the first movie reviews I ever wrote. (I gave it an A.)

Since those days though, MGM’s output has largely been a litany of crap, from the embarrassment of Basic Instinct 2: Risk Addiction (total US gross: a humiliating $3.2 million) to direct-to-DVD Species sequels. Other than its 2005 purchase by a private consortium that included Sony, the only interesting news MGM has made lately is when it turned over United Artists to Tom Cruise after Paramount dumped him due to bad press from all his couch jumping, psychiatry-bashing, Scientology-spewing lunacy. So far even that move hasn’t worked out, as UA’s first movie with Cruise at the helm, Lions for Lambs, bombed.

MGM CEO Harry Sloan has agreed to work with Parent and green-light new movies with budgets ranging from $20 million to $200 million, so they clearly have big ambitions. Initial plans are to play it safe with franchise movies such as a Thomas Crown Affair sequel, remakes of Fame and Death Wish, the latter with Sylvester Stallone, and a partnership with New Line to make two prequels to a little thing called The Lord of the Rings.

Hopefully in a couple years, MGM will have reestablished itself among the Hollywood elite. After all, Tinseltown loves a good comeback story.