Amazon MGM Studios

History

Amazon once accepted script submissions through its website, where staff would review them, but that process has since been discontinued. The company aimed to evaluate scripts within 90 days, though this timeline was not guaranteed. Writers whose projects were picked for development received $10,000. If a developed script became a full-budget movie, the creator earned $200,000; if it became a full-budget series, the creator got $55,000 plus up to 5 percent of Amazon’s net revenue from merchandise licensing and other royalties. Amazon entered film production in 2008 by co-producing The Stolen Child with 20th Century Fox. In July 2015, it acquired Spike Lee’s Chi-Raq as its first Amazon Original Movie. In 2010, Amazon Studios launched a platform where users could submit screenplays for voting by both the studio and customers, with cash prizes for top writers. Jeff Bezos described this as “the scientific studio.” The program ended eight years later due to poor script quality. In 2012, Amazon Studios released its only comic-book series, Blackburn Burrow, as a free download with an embedded survey to gauge interest in a film adaptation. By September 2012, the studio had received over 10,000 feature screenplay submissions, and by March 2013, 2,700 television pilots; at that time, 23 films and 26 television series were in active development. In late 2016, the film division was reorganized into Prime Movies. On July 27, 2017, Amazon announced that starting with the December 2017 release Wonder Wheel, it would handle its own distribution, having previously relied on outside studios. It also secured global television rights to The Lord of the Rings for $250 million. Outside the United States, Amazon continues to use external distributors like Elevation Pictures in Canada, and Warner Bros. and StudioCanal in the United Kingdom and France. In April 2018, Amazon Studios stopped accepting open screenplay submissions.