MGM has arguably suffered financial troubles for most of its existence, but a lot of their problems began in the fifties with the rise of television.

Television provided consumers with a new form of entertainment that largely took the place of the communal atmosphere of the movie theater by moving the viewing space into the home and replacing the community with a "live studio audience" (the concept of canned laughter came from this approach as a way to replicate the feeling of a crowded theater). Television was cheaper (in the long run), new, and easy to access. Many films were shown on television and, to an everyday viewer, the difference in experiencing the film in a theater or on a television screen was minimal. Film studios had to find a way to justify their existence in a world with television. They had to show that they could do something that television couldn't, and this led to the rise in production of epic films.

Long, massive in scale, and filled to the brim with handsome actors, stunning actresses, and beautiful sets, films like MGM's own Ben-Hur and Paramount Pictures' The Ten Commandments attempted to justify the existence of films by being so large, they could only be experienced on the big screen. MGM went all in on this after their success with Ben-Hur. And when I say "all in," I really mean all in. Ben Hur's financial success was strong enough to single-handedly carry the studio through a year. After they realized this, MGM attempted to replicate the success with the releases of Cimmaron, King of Kings, Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, and Mutiny on the Bounty. Unfortunately, each of these films proved to be commercial flops, and their extravagant budgets made their failures sting all the more.

After that string of flops, MGM's value plummeted and it went through several leadership changes in only a few years as well as getting purchased and re-structured multiple times in the sixties and seventies which ultimately led to a drastically reduced film production schedule.