Sequel opportunities, What does Amazon’s purchase of MGM mean for cinema?

It was recently announced, with much ballyhoo and excitement, that Amazon has added to their apparently infinite number of assets by paying $8.45 billion for MGM Studios. One strange quirk of their purchase is that they have not bought the rights to...MGM’s pre-1986 pictures. Yet what they have obtained are a rich variety of Hollywood classics, including everything from The Silence of the Lambs and Thelma and Louise to the less obviously distinguished likes of Legally Blonde and Poltergeist. And in the current intellectual property universe, for “rights’, read “remake opportunities’.

...Amazon has struggled to distinguish itself in the streaming market... But there have been a relative paucity of shows and films that have cut through to a general audience, which has in turn led to many — including this writer — regarding the entire Amazon Prime service as being predominantly a means of obtaining expedited delivery of products, with the films and television series available being little more than a pleasant but inessential bonus.

Some of us may have no particular desire to watch Miss Moneypenny’s further adventures, or to find out exactly how Ernst Stavro Blofeld became the criminal mastermind that he is presented as. But many others will be at least vaguely interested by such an idea, and, should Broccoli and Wilson give their consent – something that is by no means a given, so assiduous have they been in the curation and protection of the all-important brand – it seems an inevitability that the James Bond Extended Universe will become just as much a feature of our home entertainment as the ever-growing Star Wars and Marvel series of programming.

“Amazon has struggled to distinguish itself in the streaming market”

Want to distinguish yourself in the streaming market? Offer _everything_.

I’m not interested in [streaming_service] Exclusive.
That’s making stuff for the central purpose of being the only one supplying it, which detracts from the central purpose of making stuff CUSTOMERS WANT.
I actually go out of my way to ignore “Amazon/Hulu/AppleTV+/whatever Exclusive” movies.

I’m interested in getting _everything_ from ONE SOURCE.
I know I can walk into a public library and find or order darned near any book ever published (exotica aside).
I just had a prolonged heated discussion with my wife yesterday, trying to explain to her why I can’t “just get Movie X” without forking over stupid money to get services I otherwise don’t want - when I’d have no problem with dropping ~$6 to rent what she wants on-demand, _if_I_could_. (Not signing up for $7-70/month just so she can wait for a channel to get around to playing Movie X when they darned well feel like it, and then I pay for several months of it before realizing she hasn’t watched anything on that service past the first week, and I waste time figuring out how to cancel it.)

We’re in the 21st Century.
The vision of Netflix/Amazon/AppleTV+/etc is to provide customers EVERYTHING, ON DEMAND for a modest flat- and/or rental-rate. But no, they’re squabbling over rights control (ok, understandable, it’s big bucks) and trying to produce “Exclusive!” movies that weren’t asked for.

Amid all this squabbling, I noticed The Name Of The Rose has disappeared outright. Major movie, highly rated, big stars, ... gone.

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