Buying MGM

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"Ethan, you stubborn little bastard. I knew Hawthorne men didn't go down that easy."

Ethan was walking across the hospital lawn with his mother when his older brother appeared out of nowhere and thumped him on the chest.

"Joshua," Emily snapped, "you'll hurt him."

"Relax, Mom. I barely touched him."

Ethan looked up at the broad-shouldered man in front of him. "Joshua, aren't you supposed to be in San Francisco for team workouts? What are you doing here?"

Joshua Hawthorne was the eldest Hawthorne son, twenty-three years old and built nothing like his younger brother.

Ethan had been the academic one. Joshua's grades had always been good enough, but his real advantage was physical. He had played football through high school and college, then gone to San Francisco after graduation. Now he was with the 49ers. He wasn't a regular starter, but he dressed often enough and saw the field when the team needed him.

Joshua jabbed a thumb toward their mother. "Ask our beloved mother. She called me last night. I drove down first thing this morning."

"The team gave you time off?"

Joshua's smile turned suspicious. "Mrs. Brown in team operations likes me. I got three days."

Then he gave Ethan a look that said a great deal more than the words did.

Before Ethan could answer, Emily's face changed. Traditional as she was, her tone picked up a hard edge.

"Joshua Hawthorne, if I find out you're fooling around with married women, I may not be able to spank you anymore, but you will not set foot in this family home again."

Joshua lifted both hands and backed away. "Whoa. Whoa. What are you doing, Mom? You're looking at me like I committed a war crime."

Emily's eyes narrowed. "You know exactly what I'm talking about."

"Fine. Mrs. Brown likes me because I bring her donuts and hot dogs. She loves that stuff. That's all."

As he said it, he clasped his hands behind his back where only Ethan could see, made a ring with one hand, and thrust two fingers through it with the other.

Right.

Donuts and hot dogs.

Ethan slapped a hand over his face. "Enough, Joshua. I don't think explaining is helping. If you want to be useful, help me with something."

Joshua hooked an arm around his brother's neck. "Anything. I'm your big brother. Say the word."

"A party. Help me throw one."

Joshua understood instantly. "See? This is why we're brothers. Great minds. After what you've been through, you absolutely need to relax."

He leaned close and lowered his voice. "I'll find the place. I'll bring the girls. You won't even have to think."

Ethan stared at his borrowed older brother in silence.

Apparently, Joshua heard the word party and immediately pictured the kind of night that ended with missing clothes and bad decisions.

Random hookups had never appealed to Ethan much. Too much risk, too little control. He preferred women he actually knew, which made things cleaner and, in his experience, more interesting.

"Joshua, we'll do it at home," he said. "Invite whoever you want, but I'm giving you a list. These people have to be there."

Joshua's grin faded into curiosity. "What are you planning? Who are they?"

"College friends. The closest ones I had. Invite girls if you want, as long as Mom agrees."

Emily stood nearby with her arms folded, wearing the kind of look that made the answer obvious.

Joshua's face collapsed. "In that case, maybe we keep it simple. Movies, barbecue, beer. That's still a good time."

Ever since Ethan had seen the date, one thing had been sitting in the back of his mind.

Windtalkers was coming.

In his old timeline, John Woo's war film had opened in June 2002. It was expensive, loud, and disastrous for MGM. One movie would not kill a studio by itself, but Windtalkers was the kind of wound a weak studio could not afford.

After that, the momentum Woo had built in Hollywood with Face/Off and Mission: Impossible 2 began to collapse. Paycheck lost money the next year too. It did not fail as spectacularly as Windtalkers, but it helped close the door. Hollywood stopped handing him major studio budgets.

Afterward, Woo returned to Chinese-language productions with the reputation of an international master, raising money for projects like Red Cliff and The Crossing. Some had scale. Some had ambition. But his old style was no longer enough to guarantee success. Audiences had changed, and the market had become less forgiving.

For MGM, the worst part was not simply the money Windtalkers would lose. In Ethan's memory, several executives had taken the fall or walked away after the disaster.

Most people remembered the director, the stars, and the box office headlines. People outside Hollywood rarely remembered which executives had resigned after a failed release.

He had never expected Charles to be one of them.

No wonder Charles had been living at the office lately, looking more worn every time he came home. MGM must have already run the internal numbers on Windtalkers, and the results could not be pretty.

If Charles failed and stepped down, the whole family would feel it. More importantly, Ethan's own path into film would become much harder. He could not let that happen.

At first, he spent the day trying to think of ways to keep his father from resigning.

Then a better question hit him.

Why was he so focused on keeping Charles in the same chair?

The entire point was access. Ethan wanted to make movies. He knew that business. He knew what would hit, what would fail, and what would become a franchise before anyone else recognized it.

If the goal was to make films, what could be better than owning a film company?

And if he was going to own a film company, what could be better than buying MGM?

As one of Hollywood's legacy studios, MGM was wounded but not dead. Lionsgate, Dimension, New Line, all of them had their advantages, but MGM still had the lion, the library, its industry relationships, and a name that meant something in every country that watched movies.

In 2002, the giant was old and bleeding, but it had not fallen yet.

Better still, MGM's ownership structure was not as tangled as the other majors. Most of the power was concentrated around one man, Kirk Kerkorian, and Kerkorian had never been in love with the art of making movies. If the money was right, a deal was at least imaginable.

That left the real questions.

How much would it take to buy MGM?

And where the hell was Ethan supposed to find that kind of money?

In his old timeline, Amazon had spent more than eight billion dollars to acquire MGM, but a huge part of that value had been debt. MGM's 2002 balance sheet looked very different. He could get a better estimate from his father, but his rough guess put the number somewhere in the three-to-four-billion range.

Raising billions quickly was another matter entirely.

Stocks were too slow. Futures were too uncertain. Bitcoin did not exist yet, and even if it had, Ethan had never followed that world closely enough to exploit it.

So he turned to a less respectable route.

The 2002 FIFA World Cup was about to begin.

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