The Velvet Light Trap, Number 70, Fall 2012 DOI: 10.7560/VLT7004 ©2012 by the University of Texas Press, PO Box 7819, Austin, TX 78713-7819 n November 2010 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, once known as the “Tiffany of Studios,” filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection after failing to find a buyer willing to assume its nearly four-billion-dollar debt (Spector). While an investment consortium led by Sony Corporation had purchased the studio for $4.9 billion in 2004, six years later the highest bid received for MGM was $1.5 billion from Time Warner (Chakravorty and Adegoke). Rather than accept a lowball offer, MGM’s creditors voted for bankruptcy reorganization, which allowed them to retain ownership of the studio (Spector). MGM’s precipitous loss in value was tied to its chief asset: its 4,100-title film library, which includes all post1986 MGM films as well as the films of United Artists and Orion Pictures, among other studios. MGM’s value as a producer and distributor was negligible; its only theatrical release in 2010 was the modestly budgeted comedy Hot Tub Time Machine. In contrast, its library held such lucrative properties as the James Bond franchise, itself worth as much as $1 billion, and the distribution rights to J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit (Schuker and Spector). However, by 2010 the value of the MGM library had depreciated due in large part to an industry-wide decline in home video revenue—a 14 percent drop since 2004 (White).1 At the time of the sale to the Sony consortium, MGM was earning over $500 million annually from its library; by 2009 this had plummeted to $228 million (Spector and Schuker, “MGM Drama”). Revenue from the sale of MGM DVDs dropped from $140 million in 2007 to only $30 million in 2010 (Epstein, “MGM Follies”). Sony’s purchase of MGM’s library helped its Blu-ray highdefinition system defeat HD-DVD in a format war, but this was little consolation to the Wall Street investors who had gambled on the durability of the home video The Warner Archive and DVD Collecting in the New