Universal, meanwhile, has struggled in recent years to produce enough movies — even with the efforts of Working Title and Imagine — to justify its expensive distribution overhead. (They each release far fewer titles than Warner or Sony). And for the past 30 years, Universal and Paramount have been partnered (with MGM until 2000) in United International Pictures to distribute their flicks internationally, though the studios began winding that entity down in 2007. Especially of interest to us movie buffs is that a merger would effectively give Paramount back the vast pre-1948 talkie library it sold in 1956 to MCA, as Universal’s parent company was then known.