United Artists - Film Archives

Film Archives

The value of film libraries has increased exponentially in recent years, even as ownership gets more fractured. Few studios had the foresight or ability to maintain control over every picture they produced or released.

United Artists, through various strategic purchases, built up a substantial film and television library. Included were rights not only to some of UA's own releases, but to the RKO and pre-1950 Warner Bros. libraries. Having passed through numerous hands, these catalogs now belong to Time Warner's Turner Entertainment unit.

Since UA produced very few of the pictures it released, the copyrights of UA's output up until the 1970s belonged to the individual or company producing. UA managed to acquire full rights to a majority of these films later on. MGM-Pathé, now simply known as MGM (or, for legal purposes, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios), took over the copyrights to UA films (particularly the in-house productions) after the studio folded into the former company in 1990. Productions made after the company was revived by MGM in 1994 are copyrighted by UA. Still, the rights to many UA releases around this time reverted back to the producers.

Some UA films of the 1930s, 1940s and early 1950s fell into the public domain, to be picked up by Republic Pictures (today part of Paramount Pictures) or studios like Westchester Films (successor to Castle Hill Productions), and what will soon become the DreamWorks Classics division of DreamWorks Animation (in most cases with distribution by Warner Bros.). A small fraction of UA's silent output is now owned by Kino International.

A number of United Artists' films from the 1920s through the 1940s that are in the public domain are seldom shown. Of the hundreds of films UA distributed over eighty years, those it still owns outright are most of its own productions from 1951 forward, plus a few pre-1951 films such as 1933's Hallelujah, I'm a Bum and Howard Hawks' Red River (1948) with parent company MGM handling distribution. Until the early '90s, many of those films were released on home video by Magnetic Video, which later became CBS/Fox Video, in the United States and Canada and by Warner Home Video internationally.