Long-running UA logo under Transamerica ownership.
For years, the names of James Bond and United Artists went together.
The studio, founded in 1919, brought Ian Fleming's gentleman spy to theater screens from 1962 to 1981.
UA was founded by Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin, D.W. Griffith, and Douglas Fairbanks. The artists wanted to take more control over business matters.
After decades, UA struggled. A new business team led by Arthur Krim and Robert Benjamin, took command in 1951. The new group had UA act, essentially, as a bank for producers. UA didn't have a physical studio, the way other studios did.
The Krim-led UA released such movies as The African Queen, High Noon, The Magnificent Seven, West Side Story, and other movies. In 1961, the UA executives cut a deal with Albert R. Broccoli and Harry Saltzman to begin a series of James Bond films, based on rights Saltzman had acquired on option. The deal was reached as Saltzman's option was running out.
In 1967, UA sold itself to Transamerica Corp., a financial conglomerate. Transamerica kept the UA management team aboard. UA movies now had a logo that said, "United Artists, Entertainment from Transamerica Corporation."
In the later years of Transamerica ownership, Krim's team fled. Steven Bach, an executive promoted to replace one of the departures, wrote a 1985 book called Final Cut. Among other things, Bach wrote, some at Transamerica at one point wanted to change the name of the studio to Transamerica Studios.
Even after UA was purchased by MGM from Transamerica in 1981, the United Artists name persisted. At times, the company was billed as MGM-UA. After a long legal fight between Eon Productions and MGM that prevented 007 movies from coming out, GoldenEye was released under the United Artists label in 1995. Ditto for Tomorrow Never Dies in 1997.
In 1999, however, MGM mostly retired the United Artists brand. (The 2008 Tom Cruise movie Valkyrie would be distributed under the UA name.) The World Is Not Enough (1999) was released as an MGM movie. The MGM logo at the start of film celebrated MGM's 75th anniversary. The term "United Artists Corp." showed up in some Bond film copyright notices.
MGM suffered various financial setbacks despite being involved with Bond. MGM filed for bankruptcy in 2010. That delayed production for 2012's Skyfall.
MGM was a shadow of its glory days. It relied on Sony's Columbia Pictures to distribute four Bond films from 2006 to 2015. In 2017, MGM and Annapurna created a joint venture to release each other's movies in the U.S.
In 2019, that joint venture took the name United Artists Releasing. The announcement of that name change took place on the 100th anniversary of the founding of the original United Artists.
For long-time Bond fans, it was a taste of nostalgia. The UA label -- albeit, in a very diluted way -- was again associated with the film Bond.
For a time.
No Time to Die in 2021, Eon's most recent Bond movie, was released in the U.S. by United Artists Releasing. However, Amazon bought MGM in 2021, In early 2023, MGM absorbed United Artists Releasing under Amazon ownership.
As stated before, the names of James Bond and United Artists went together for a long time. But no longer, or so it seems. This may be the final divorce.
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