Why do several MGM movies list Loew's as the production company?

IMDb customer service replied to my email. Their response was obviously canned and not helpful or appropriate to the situation at all. They just gave me the whole generic spiel about how it's IMDb's "policy not to alter or delete any kind of correct/factual information or credit from our records" and that credits "need to be listed exactly as they appeared on-screen for the title".

In light of this unhelpful declaration, I would just like to use an example to demonstrate that IMDb has a problem here that they need to figure out instead of just blowing me off. Let us compare and contrast the opening title sequences of two MGM films, The Wizard of Oz (1939) and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954), and see how IMDb handles each of these situations.

For starters, here are three screenshots from the title sequence for The Wizard of Oz (1939):

The first screenshot is of MGM's famous Roaring Lion trademark. The second screenshot shows the credit "Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Presents". The third screenshot shows the title of the film, a copyright notice for "Loew's Incorporated", a "Metro-Goldyn-Mayer Picture" logo, and the credit "Produced by Loew's Incorporated". Now, let's look at the company credits as shown on IMDb:

In this case, IMDb gives both production and distribution credits to MGM, while acknowledging Loew's in the attributes as having controlling interest in the company.

Next we will examine screenshots from the title sequence of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954):

As you can see, the title sequence begins much as The Wizard of Oz began, with MGM's famous roaring lion trademark. The next shot features the credit "In Cinemascope", which isn't really relevant to this discussion. This is followed by the main title, "Seven Brides for Seven Brothers". The screenshot is unfortunately in a lower resolution and harder to read, but if you look closely you'll see that it has basically exactly the same combination of title credits that The Wizard of Oz had: a copyright notice held by "Loew's Incorporated", the "Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Picture" logo, and the credit "Produced by Loew's Incorporated". Interestingly, an alternate version of the opening credits I found (which you can see in the fourth screenshot) is slighter different from the previous image, including the copyright notice and MGM logo, but not the "Produced by" credit.

In summary, the combination and sequence of companies credited on both films is almost exactly the same. But if we look up company credits of the title on IMDb, will they treat the situation the same way, or will they inexplicably treat these two nearly-identical situations in a completely different fashion? Let's see!

As you can see, in the latter situation, IMDb interprets the same company credits in a completely different fashion for no discernible reason. In this second situation, IMDb treats "Loew's" as a completely separate production company to MGM, rather than as the company that controls MGM. What fun!

CONCLUSION

At the very least, I think I have demonstrated an inarguable inconsistency in IMDb's treatment of the company credits for classic MGM films. Regardless of which interpretation is preferred, it is clear that they cannot both be equally valid.

I will now attempt to argue why I think the former approach (as shown in The Wizard of Oz) is the superior approach.

It has been my understanding that IMDb is not only concerned with the way credits are displayed onscreen, but also with the reality behind the screen. This is why we have attributes like "uncredited" for instances where a person is otherwise unacknowledged by the credits, "credit only" for instances where a person/company is falsely credited, and "as ______" for instances where a person/company is credited under a different name. In the course of my attempting to research this "Loew's Incorporated", I have found no credible evidence of it actually producing its own films separately from MGM. The references to Loew's in the copyright notices and credits are indicative of Loews' controlling interest in the company, not of direct participation in the production of the film. I defy anyone to produce evidence to the contrary as I could not find any. It seems perfectly sensible to deal with the situation in the way that IMDb has dealt with the situation in the majority of MGM titles including The Wizard of Oz, rather than the way it has been handled in a (surprisingly sizeable) minority of situations (including Seven Brides for Seven Brothers).

If you continue to ignore me about this situation, then your site will instead be full of oddly inconsistent company credits that wrongly cut off a not-insignificant chunk of the cinematic repertoire of one of the most famous film studios of the Golden Age of Hollywood and store them separately under a different (much less familiar) name for no good reason, when in fact they were produced in the same studios and owned by what is essentially the same company.

Hi majfoalbkeopaza-

Thank you for reporting! We are reviewing all of this information with our policy team and we will reply to confirm once we have further details. 

Cheers!

I dug up an old project of mine from 2018 and also checked the Wayback Machine. It appears that as recently as 2022 the Loew's company page on IMDb was only used for 183 titles, and they were all MGM cartoons, not features. When I first created this post, there were 273 titles credited to Loew's, and in the short span of time since then, the number has increased to 281. This suggests that in the past few years somebody has been hard at work trying to replace MGM with Loew's on hundreds of titles.

The Wayback Machine data is sparse, but shows the number of Loew's titles on IMDb fluctuating wildly in the short span of time from 2021 to the present, peaking at 397 before dropping down to about 280 currently. Needless to say, this is rather odd and unusual. It seems likely that there has been an editing war raging on between whoever is making these changes and the person or persons trying to revert them.

I don't know whether this is being done out of ignorance or if people are abandoning common sense for the sake of adhering to some kind of inflexible and misguided rule, but replacing MGM's many, many production credits with Loew's is a bad idea and whoever is doing it should be stopped.