Over at Deadline Hollywood, the site is reporting that the movie studio MGM is in potentially deep trouble, and quite possibly out of money. This is the same MGM that has just released only its second movie of the year, the remake of Fame, and that film has suffered the same fate as its only other 2009 release, The Pink Panther 2, in underwhelming at the box office.

The trials and tribulations of MGM over the past decade or two have been well charted, as the studio sits on top of the biggest and most valuable film archive of any studio. However, it's simply struggled to churn out new hits in the same manner of virtually all of its major competitors. The average gross of an MGM movie since 1995 has been $20.4m, against $54.1 for Buena Vista, $48.9 for Warner Bros and $57.8 for Paramount.

Even New Line, which was fully absorbed by Warner Bros after a string of disappointments, averages $39.4m (although the Lord Of The Rings films do help that average a lot). The last time it had a film cross even the $70m mark at the US box office was the John Cusack starrer 1408 back in June of 2007. Before that? Legally Blonde 2 notched up $90m in 2003. It's fair to say that it's been a bit of a barren period, only occasionally enlivened by hits such as Hannibal and Barbershop (and the Bond movies to which it held distribution rights, of course).

The millstone around MGM's neck now appears to be a debt in the region of $3.5bn, and Deadline Hollywood reports that a conference call took place last week with MGM bondholders where "MGM made a desperate plea for money because the studio had missed its numbers and was going to be out of funds very soon."

The conference call, which the site goes into in some detail on, apparently featured the threat that the bondholders of the studio would basically let it go bankrupt. And that's where two big movie franchises come under some threat.

The first is James Bond, the last two films of which have been distributed by Sony. The rights are now back with MGM, but should the studio go bankrupt, it would surrender them. That alone seems to be the one thing that's keeping MGM upright, as Bond pretty much guarantees a major movie and a $500m worldwide gross every couple of years.

The second is the soon-to-shoot The Hobbit. MGM has been asking if it can hold off interest payments until into 2010, primarily because it appears it needs the money to pay for the films it currently has in production. And none are bigger, or you suspect more expensive, than the pair of Hobbit movies that Guillermo del Toro will be rolling cameras on early next year.

While it's unthinkable that even if the worst happened to MGM that either franchise would disappear, it's hard to discount the thought that it could leave both embroiled in rights issues, or simply ownership problems, for some time to come. Some suggest that the worst case scenario is that both franchises would disappear with MGM, but that's blatantly not going to happen. Instead, what's more likely is that both will find themselves stalled, a fate that the Bond saga already had to sit through for the first part of the 1990s.

You can read more on the struggle to keep MGM up and running here and we wonder just which of the Hollywood majors may possibly jump in and try and pick up MGM for a knockdown price. Time Warner would be our guess...