It looks as if the long-running financial catastrophe engulfing MGM has finally reached a critical stage. It now transpires that lenders to the studio, once one of Hollywood’s most successful, are preparing to seize 95 per cent of assets in preparation for the company’s slide into formal bankruptcy. Buyers have been circling for the past year, but, with debts now exceeding $4 billion (€2.85 billion), the entity can no longer be considered independently viable.

It seems as if Spyglass Entertainment, co-producers of recent hits such as

Star Trek

and

Get Him to the Greek

, will be brought in to run a slimmed-down version of the crippled giant. This would not be such an undignified situation for MGM. After all, in the past it has been controlled by casino mogul Kirk Kerkorian and CNN honcho Ted Turner.

A successful movie company, Spyglass should know how to exploit such in-the-pipeline MGM co-productions as

The Hobbit

and that missing James Bond film.