When people think MGM, they don't think of science fiction, they think of the Wizard of Oz and James Bond. While Supernova might not change that, it's an encouraging sign that the venerable cinematic empire may be looking spaceward.

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer has more than 5,000 films in its vaults, making its library the largest in the world, but only a handful of SF movies have ever come out of the lion's mouth.

MGM had no time for flying saucers back in the golden age of the early 1950s. The studio was too upscale to bother with spaceships and bug-eyed monsters, especially when musical comedies like Singin' in the Rain (1952) were still raking in both critical prestige and box office dollars. Smaller and less glamorous outfits like Universal and RKO could squabble over the low-budget worlds beyond the Earth -- down here, MGM owned the good real estate.

The film was a financial success and left the critics awed (albeit a bit confused), but the studio seemed satisfied that it had said all that needed to be said on the subject of space exploration, first contact and science fiction in general. The sequel, 2010: The Year We Make Contact (1984) came as a long-delayed and, to many, disappointing afterthought.

After Star Wars made space opera big business in Hollywood, MGM held itself aloof, refusing to dip into the space pool until picking up the U.S. distribution rights to 1994's Stargate. That film went on to gross nearly $200 million worldwide, but by then the lion's fortunes had declined too far to make many other big-budget FX epics on its own. The follow-up Species was a modest success, but did not manage to inspire much hope that Stargate had been more than an isolated hit.

Even if MGM had managed to capitalize on science fiction after Stargate, the Star Wars boom had fizzled out more than a decade previously, with ever-rising production budgets and hit-or-miss audiences leaving SF a very high-risk gamble for Hollywood.

Despite all this, the legacy of 75 years of aggressive expansion has left the MGM vaults with a few genre classics, mostly acquired in the early 1980s after the studio absorbed bankrupt rival United Artists.

Red Planet Mars (1952) - Seemingly Christian aliens deliver a benign message to Earth, obliterating Communism in the process. Acquired from United Artists.

The Quatermass Xperiment (1955) - Predatory alien monster hitches a ride on a crewed British rocket, infiltrating the mind and body of one of the astronauts. Like other classic Hammer Horror films of this vintage, this one was co-produced by United Artists, and so eventually found its way into the MGM library.

Quatermass II (1957) - In this second cinematic installment of the Quatermass series, meteors interfere with the professor's efforts to put the Union Jack on the moon. Another Hammer-UA collaborative effort.

Invisible Invaders (1959) - Standard saucer invasion epic pits noble scientists against marauding aliens, but there's a twist: these undetectable extraterrestrials can also raise the dead. UA picked up this obscurity from Premium Pictures, which only survived long enough to make one other film, the similarly exploitative Inside the Mafia (1959).

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) - The perhaps unjustly maligned remake of the 1956 classic (with a script by legendary Buckaroo Banzai scribe W.D. Richter, of all people), and a United Artists film from start to finish. The studio's days were already numbered, with Heaven's Gate (1980) looming ahead.

Lifeforce (1985) - Evil space vampires ride the space shuttle back from Halley's Comet, setting up shop in London where they do untold damage. This oddity in the MGM catalog is an artifact of the studio's short-lived co-distribution efforts with schlock masters the Cannon Group.

Stargate (1994) - The property that put MGM back on the science fiction map (and kept it there thanks to the untiring efforts of the studio's television unit and three years of Stargate SG-1) and, until Supernova, the company's only modern venture into the world of big-budget space thrillers. Ironically, MGM did not produce Stargate, but only took over U.S. distribution rights.

Species (1995) - MGM's follow-up to Stargate was more creature feature than space opera, but the combination of sex, horror and computer morphing effects helped the film into the black.

Species II (1998) - On the other hand, the sequel was at best a qualified success at the box office and an undistinguished failure with fans and critics.

Supernova (2000) - The crew of a medical rescue ship must cope with a crazed stranger and the weird alien machine he's brought with him. Originally slated for a 1997 release, first director Geoffrey Wright and then Walter Hill walked off the project, leaving Francis Ford Coppola to cobble a final cut together. Meanwhile, the budget edged up to $70 million, ensuring that any embarrassment MGM receives over the film will be costly.