MOST OF US shop with Amazon to buy £20 4K Blu-rays. When Amazon goes shopping, it spends $8.45bn on movie studio MGM/United Artists. The impact this might have for both the film industry and for home cinema enthusiasts could be huge.
Coming just two years after Disney's acquisition of 21st Century Fox, it's easy to see it as just another mega media merger. But Amazon remains primarily a retailer, not a studio.
The US doesn't have a great history when one industry decides to move into another. An example is the 'streetcar conspiracy' of the 1940s, when the automotive industry began acquiring ownership of vast chunks of the country's public transport system for not entirely altruistic reasons – the inspiration for the plot of Who Framed Roger Rabbit? some forty years later. A federal judge dished out a few slaps on the wrists, but the damage had been done.
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