March 20th , 1927
Leo the Lion is the mascot for the Hollywood film studio Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and one of its predecessors, Goldwyn Pictures. The logo was created by artist Lionel S. Reiss, who served as art director at Paramount Pictures.
Since 1917, and through the time the studio was formed by the merger of Samuel Goldwyn’s studio with Marcus Loew’s Metro Pictures and Louis B. Mayer’s company in 1924, several different lions have been used for the MGM logo.
Although MGM has referred to all of the lions used in their trademark as “Leo the Lion”, only the lion in use since 1957, was actually named “Leo”. In 2021, MGM debuted a new CGI logo which features a lion partially based on Leo.
