United Artists was formed in 1919 by four of the leading figures in the early Hollywood era: Mary Pickford, Charles Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, and D. W. Griffith. It was largely sold to Arthur Krim and Robert Benjamin in 1951; both Chaplin and Pickford sold the remaining shares to Krim and Benjamin in 1956. United Artists was sold to Transamerica Corporation on April 27, 1967, and later to Kirk Kerkorian's Tracinda, Inc. (then the owner of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) on July 28, 1981. MGM would use both their brand and United Artists as labels during this time under the MGM/UA brand. In 1986, Turner Broadcasting System purchased MGM/UA Entertainment Co. and renamed it to MGM Entertainment Co. United Artists' assets were purchased back by Kirk Kerkorian, who would use them to found a new company under that name. However, when Turner gained heavy debt over the MGM purchase, he sold the company back to Kirk Kerkorian, with the new United Artists being renamed as MGM/UA Communications Company, with MGM and United Artists being used as distribution labels. This still wasn't enough, as the company gained a loss of $88 million, leading to MGM and United Artists splitting into separate divisions. By 1990, after the purchase of MGM/UA by Giancarlo Parretti, United Artists became dormant in favor of the MGM label being used instead. In 1993, after Crédit Lyonnais' purchase of MGM, he convinced John Calley to run UA, allowing the Pink Panther and James Bond franchises alongside one of the few NC-17 films released by a major studio, Showgirls (which was distributed internationally by Chargeurs). Kirk Kerkorian later repurchased MGM in 1996, and Calley resigned. In 1999, MGM folded the existing United Artists company into their own operations (with copyrights for The Pink Panther and Rocky transitioning to MGM, although the James Bond series retained a UA copyright for legacy purposes) and rebranded their G2 Films (a renamed portion of the former Samuel Goldwyn Company) division as United Artists International, with the United Artists brand now being used as an art-house theater label. On April 8, 2005, Sony Corporation of America, Comcast, and four other partners bought MGM and United Artists for $4.8 billion. In November 2006, Tom Cruise and Paula Wagner were made the new heads of this revamped United Artists. However, on August 14, 2008, Wagner left the studio but still remained a stockholder in United Artists. In 2011, it became wholly owned by MGM again when the studio purchased the stock formerly owned by Cruise and Wagner. As a result, UA was absorbed but still existed as an in-name-only unit of MGM. In September 2014, MGM acquired a stake in Mark Burnett's One Three Media and Lightworkers Media, merging them into United Artists Media Group; the next year, however, UAMG was folded into MGM Television. In 2018, MGM revived the UA brand as United Artists Digital Studios, which was folded into MGM in 2020. The United Artists name would finally return to the big screen in 2019 as United Artists Releasing, a rebranding of MGM and Annapurna Pictures' existing distribution joint-venture Mirror Releasing, distributing movies from fellow MGM subsidiaries Orion Pictures, Orion Classics and American International Pictures. On March 4, 2023, the same day Creed III was released to theaters, it was announced that United Artists Releasing was folded back into MGM due to Amazon (the current owner of MGM)'s optimism of the feasibility of theatrical distribution; the UA logo was noticeably missing from marketing materials and posts for MGM's slate of 2023 releases, most notably Creed III. On July 26, 2024, Amazon MGM Studios announced that the United Artists name would be revived once again as an alternative film label to be headed by former Netflix chairman Scott Stuber.