James Bond Wiki
Register
Advertisement
James Bond Wiki
300px-United Artists logo svg

United Artists Corporation (aka United Artists Associated, United Artists Pictures, and United Artists Films) was a movie studio and a subsidiary of MGM, itself part of the Sony Pictures/Comcast joint venture. It is currently "branded" as an art-house studio.

UA, an MGM division for a quarter century, also shares the copyright (with Danjaq L.L.C.) of the wildly successful James Bond film franchise.

History[]

It backed two expatriate Americans in Britain, who had acquired screen rights to Ian Fleming's Bond novels. For $1 million, UA backed Harry Saltzman and Albert R. Broccoli's Dr. No (which was a sensation in 1962) and served as the launching point for the James Bond series. That franchise has outlived UA's life as a major studio, still running forty years later and still co-owned by UA. Other successful projects backed in this period included Blake Edwards's Pink Panther series, which began in 1964, and Sergio Leone's Spaghetti Westerns, which made a star of Clint Eastwood.

In 1990 came the farcical sale to the Italian promoter Giancarlo Parretti; having bought MGM/UA by wildly overstating his own financial condition, within a year Parretti had defaulted to his primary bank, Crédit Lyonnais, which foreclosed on the studio in 1992. In an effort to make MGM/UA saleable, Credit Lyonnais ramped up production, reviving the James Bond films. MGM was sold in 1997, again to Kirk Kekorian. During the 2000s, UA was repositioned as a boutique or specialty studio, while the Bond francise was move to MGM. UA (re-christened United Artists Films) released a few "art-house" films.

On April 8, 2005, a partnership of Comcast, Sony and several merchant banks bought United Artists and its parent, MGM, for a total of $4.8 billion.

On 2023, it was folded into MGM.

Bond films[]

1960s[]

1970s[]

1980s[]

1990s[]

2020s[]

Gallery[]

External links[]

Advertisement