Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation is one of the six major American film studios as of 2011. Located in the Century City area of Los Angeles, just west of Beverly Hills, the studio is a subsidiary of News Corporation. The company was founded on May 31, 1935, as the result of the merger of Fox Film Corporation, founded by William Fox in 1915, and Twentieth Century Pictures, founded in 1933 by Darryl F. Zanuck, Joseph Schenck,Raymond Griffith and William Goetz.
20th Century Fox's most popular film franchises include Avatar, The Simpsons, Star Wars, Ice Age, Garfield,Alvin and the Chipmunks, X-Men, Die Hard, Alien,Speed, Revenge of the Nerds, Planet of the Apes, Home Alone, Dr. Dolittle, Night at the Museum, Predator, and The Chronicles of Narnia (which was previously distributed by Walt Disney Pictures). Some of the most famous actors to come out of this studio were Shirley Temple, who was 20th Century Fox's first movie star,Betty Grable, Gene Tierney, Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield.
Their most commercially successful production partners in later years has been 1492 Pictures,Lucasfilm, Lightstorm Entertainment, Davis Entertainment, Walden Media, Regency Enterprises, Blue Sky Studios, Troublemaker Studios, Marvel Studios, Ingenious Film Partners, Scott Free Productions,Gracie Films, EuropaCorp, Color Force, Centropolis Entertainment, Conundrum Entertainment, Bad Hat Harry Productions, Red Hour Productions, Village Roadshow Pictures, Dune Entertainment, Chernin Entertainment, The Donners' Company, 21 Laps Entertainment and Spyglass Entertainment.
With the introduction of sound technologies, Fox moved to acquire the rights to a sound-on-film process. In the years 1925–26, Fox purchased the rights to the work of Freeman Harrison Owens, the U.S. rights to the Tri-Ergon system invented by three German inventors, and the work of Theodore Case. This resulted in the Movietone sound system later known as "Fox Movietone". Later that year, the company began offering films with a music-and-effects track, and the following year Fox began the weekly Fox Movietone News feature, which ran until 1963. The growing company needed space, and in 1926 Fox acquired 300 acres (1.2 km2) in the open country west of Beverly Hills and built "Movietone City", the best-equipped studio of its time.
After the war and with the advent of television audiences drifted away, Twentieth Century-Fox held on to its theaters until a court-mandated divorce; they were spun off as Fox National Theaters in 1953. That year, with attendance at half the 1946 level, Twentieth Century-Fox gambled on an unproven gimmick. Noting that the two movie sensations of 1952 had been Cinerama, which required three projectors to fill a giant curved screen, and "Natural Vision" 3D, which got its effects of depth by requiring the use of polarized glasses, Fox mortgaged its studio to buy rights to a French anamorphic projection system which gave a slight illusion of depth without glasses. President Spyros Skouras struck a deal with the inventor Henri Chrétien, leaving the other filmstudios empty-handed, and in 1953 introduced CinemaScope in the studio's ground-breaking feature film The Robe.
The success of The Robe was so massive that in February 1953 Zanuck announced that henceforth all Fox pictures would be made in CinemaScope. To convince theater owners to install this new process, Fox agreed to help pay conversion costs (about $25,000 per screen); and to ensure enough product, Fox gave access to CinemaScope to any rival studio choosing to use it. Seeing the box-office for the first two CinemaScope features, The Robe and How to Marry a Millionaire, Warner Bros., MGM,Universal Pictures (then known as Universal-International), Columbia Pictures and Disney quickly adopted the process. In 1956 Fox engaged Robert Lippert to establish a subsidiary company, Regal Pictures, later Associate Producers, Incorporated to film B pictures in CinemaScope.
With financial stability came new owners, and in 1978 control passed to the investors Marc Rich and Marvin Davis. By 1985, Rich had fled the U.S. after evading $100 million in U.S. income taxes, and Davis sold Rich's half of Fox to Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation. Six months later Davis sold his half of Fox, giving News Corp complete control. To run the studio, Murdoch hired Barry Diller from Paramount. Diller brought with him a plan which Paramount's board had refused: a studio-backed, fourth television network that was financed by advertising.
To gain FCC approval of Fox's purchase of Metromedia's television holdings, once the stations of the old DuMont network, Murdoch had to become a US citizen. He did so in 1985 (the same year 20th Century-Fox dropped the hyphen from its name), and in 1986 the new Fox Broadcasting Company took to the air. Over the next 20-odd years the network and owned-stations group expanded to become extremely profitable for News Corp.
Since January 2000 this company has been the international distributor for MGM/UA releases, until as of 2005,when Turner Broadcasting System bought MGM the worldwide video distributor for the MGM/UA library. In the 1980s Fox— through a joint venture with CBS, called CBS/Fox Video—had distributed certain UA films on video, thus UA has come full circle by switching to Fox for video distribution. Fox also makes money distributing movies for small independent film companies.
In 2008 Fox announced an Asian subsidiary, Fox STAR Studios, a joint venture with STAR TV, also owned by News Corporation. It was reported that Fox STAR would start by producing films for the Bollywood market, then expand to several Asian markets.
20th Television is Fox's television syndication division. 20th Century Fox Television is the studio's television production division.
During the mid-1950s features were released to television in hope that they would broaden sponsorship and help distribution of network programs. Blocks of one-hour programming of feature films to national sponsors on 128 stations was organized by Twentieth Century Fox and National Telefilm Associates. 20th Century Fox received 50 percent interest in NTA Film network after it sold its library to National Telefilm Associates. This gave ninety minutes of cleared time a week and syndicated feature films to 110 non-interconnected stations for sale to national sponsors.
Fox Music is Fox's music arm since 2000. It encompasses music publishing and licensing businesses, dealing primarily with Fox Entertainment Group television and film soundtracks.
Related companies:
- Foxtel – Australian Cable TV operator
- Related products:
- 20th Century Fox Studio Classics – A premium DVD collection
- Fox Family Fun – A family DVD collection
- Blu-ray Disc Association
- List of Hollywood movie studios
- CinemaScope
- Backlot
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