UFA had been privatised in 1921 by a sale of the state's holdings to the Deutsche Bank and had become the mainstay of an industry that produced up to 600 feature films a year in the 1920s. In addition to UFA, there were some 230 film companies in business in Berlin alone at this time. However, film industry financing was a fragile business in the unstable economy of the Weimar Republic, and this, coupled with the industry's tendency to overreach itself financially (such as in the production of Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927), perhaps the most famous German film of this period), frequently led to bankruptcies and financial ruin. UFA itself was forced to go into a disadvantageous partnership called Parufamet with the American studios Paramount and MGM in 1925 before being taken over by the nationalist industrialist and newspaper owner Alfred Hugenberg in 1927. The company's financial travails did not prevent it from producing numerous significant films throughout this period, among them, Ernst Lubitsch's Madame Du Barry (1919), Lang's epic production of Die Nibelungen, and Murnau's The Last Laugh (1925), and the development of the studios at Babelsberg, originally established in 1912 but later taken over by UFA and expanded massively to accommodate the filming of Metropolis, gave the German film industry a highly developed infrastructure. Babelsberg was at the centre of German filmmaking for several years, "the German equivalent to Hollywood