Bloomberg Business Week reports today that MGM has invited a second round of bids for its assets by mid-March. At the end of March, the suspension of interest payments on the studio’s $3.7 billion debt ends.

According to three anonymous sources, “Billionaire Len Blavatnik’s Access Industries, Time Warner Inc., Lions Gate Entertainment Corp. and Liberty Media Corp. are among the potential buyers examining MGM books.” (Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. dropped out without bidding in the first round.)  The article goes on, “Suitors are trying to assess the value of MGM assets that include a 4,100-movie library, future “Bond” movies and rights to co-distribute films based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s ‘The Hobbit.'”

The first round of bids is non-binding pending due diligence. (That means the process whereby the potential bidders sign non-disclosure agreements and are allowed to examine MGM’s assets and debts in order to determine what they think it’s worth.) As that process has gone forward, MGM has invited bidders it considers serious to move into the second round of bidding.

As always, I caution fans that MGM’s problems probably have little to do with the delays (short so far) that have been occurring on the Hobbit film’s progress. Warner Bros. no doubt put all sorts of contingency clauses into its contract with MGM. Warner may acquire the Hobbit rights if Time Warner buys MGM. If some other company buys MGM, it will presumably be bound by that same contract.

(A tip of the pointy wizard hat to Compa Mighty on the Hobbit message boards at TORN for alerting us to this story.)

TheOneRing.net alerts us to the fact that the LOTR official website has been redesigned in preparation for the April 6 release of the theatrical-version DVDs. Pre-orders are available.

So far there’s not a whole lot there, and maybe it will never grow large. I’m glad I still have my “Wizards” screensaver, acquired c. 2002, since all those and the other free downloads seem to be gone. (They did remain available for a long time.)

Not surprisingly, the old New Line shop is nowhere to be found. LOTR stuff is now sold on Warner Bros.’ online shop. There are still a few of the old franchise items on offer in the various categories–the Noble chess set and a half dozen or so of the Sideshow Weta figures and so on.

There’s also a link to the LOTR Facebook site. I’m rather glad that Facebook and Twitter weren’t around when I was researching the LOTR film trilogy and the internet. I’m on Facebook, but I’m barely active there, and I don’t tweet. In those days it was mostly Yahoo! groups and personal websites. Live Journal wasn’t even a factor yet.

I have to admit that the trilogy is slipped further back into history, but the franchise, however reduced, continues

As we await the outcome of the bidding process for the debt-ridden MGM studio, Variety has published an interesting story that sheds a little light on the process.

We’ve all heard about the slump in DVD sales, as viewers switch over to online rentals. In recent decades, with its production moribund or low, MGM has particularly depended on income from sales of its older films on DVD. Given that the studio was one of the top producers in Hollywood in its golden age, it has an impressive library of titles: The Wizard of Oz, Singin’ in the Rain, North by Northwest.

That library is a big part of the package of assets that MGM is offering to bidders. According to Variety, though:

While MGM is hoping for more than $2 billion for more than 4,000 movies, including the James Bond franchise and half of the rights of two upcoming “Hobbit” films, and 10,000 TV episodes, the nearly 10 potential bidders, including Time Warner and Lionsgate are looking to pay less than that. […]

While MGM was adept at repeatedly repackaging its top films on DVD, the older a film gets the less valuable it becomes to consumers, analysts say. There’s only so much coin that can be squeezed out of even a James Bond film, no matter how many special editions are released.

In the U.S. alone, MGM’s net receipts from DVDs fell from $140 million in its 2007 fiscal year to just $30 million by 2010, according to Edward Jay Epstein, whose book “The Hollywood Economist: The Hidden Financial Reality Behind the Movies” is being published this month.

The implication seems to be that the Bond and Hobbit rights are playing a larger part in the overall calculations of the companies that are bidding on MGM’s assets than they might have without the decline in DVD sales.

Working my way through the stack of trade magazines that accumulated during my recent trip, I found two stories in The Hollywood Reporter that explain more about the MGM situation than I had seen in other sources. I’ll try to summarize what they say, as well as add a bit of recent news. (Online, the stories are here and here.)

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I’m still trying to catch up with everything that accumulated during my recent month in Europe. One thing I ran across was an interesting interview with Peter Jackson in ICG, the magazine of the International Cinematographers Guild. It’s in the December, 2009 print issue or online here.

Interviews by professionals in the film industry tend to be a bit more substantive than those by entertainment journalists–not surprisingly. But don’t be put off by the thought that this one is full of technical terms that you won’t understand. It’s pretty straightforward stuff.

It’s mostly on The Lovely Bones, but there are a number of topics touched on that reveal Peter’s ideas about adaptation and cinematography in general. I recommend it.