The Chain of Title: sold for 5 million as a flop, killed as too niche

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Before you judge Amazon calling Stargate "too niche," look at how Amazon came to own it. The franchise's whole history is a story of the people who controlled it never believing in what they had.

Sold for 5 million dollars as a presumed flop

Stargate was independently financed in 1994 by a French group (Le Studio Canal+), Carolco Pictures, and Devlin and Emmerich's own company, Centropolis. In Dean Devlin's own words:

"The week before the movie opened, the people who had financed the movie, which was a group out of France, were so sure that they had a bomb they sold the movie to MGM for 5 million dollars. So then, MGM owned the movie."

Then it opened number one and grossed 196 million dollars worldwide

On a 55 million dollar budget, it seeded 30 years of television.

The studio that made it then collapsed

Carolco filed for bankruptcy in 1995. When Canal+ bought the broader Carolco library in 1996, Stargate was not even in the auction. It had already gone to MGM two years earlier, for that 5 million dollar flop-sale price.

MGM, and Stargate with it, was acquired by Amazon in 2022 for 8.45 billion dollars

So the chain runs: financiers who were certain it would flop, to a studio that went bankrupt, to MGM almost by accident, to Amazon inside an 8.45 billion dollar deal. At every step the people holding the rights underestimated it. At every step it outperformed them anyway.

• A film sold for 5 million made 196 million.
• A "dead" franchise ran three decades.
• A property folded into an 8.45 billion dollar acquisition still charts in France 19 years later.

And in 2026, the latest owner looked at that 32-year record of being underestimated and profitable, and called it too niche.

The one constant in Stargate's history is that the people who owned it never saw what they had. The fans always did.

Janus