News Corporation has chosen the name 21st Century Fox for its new media and entertainment company, which will include Fox News, Fox Broadcasting and its Hollywood television and movie studio. ...
Interesting facts about 20th Century Fox ...
Founded by film pioneer William Fox, the Fox Film Corporation was one of the biggest, most successful movie studios of the silent era. (Legendary directors John Ford and Raoul Walsh spent their formative years there. And Fox Film Corporation pioneered sound-on-film.)
In the sound era, Fox Film Corporation fell on tough times and by the mid-thirties was on the financial ropes. Twentieth Century Pictures, founded and run by the hard-charging Darryl F. Zanuck (who had earlier run Warner Bros.) merged with Fox Film Corporation. Though Fox was larger, Twentieth Century Pictures was dominant. (Over the previous two-and-a-half years, Twentieth had released twenty profitable features out of a total of twenty-one features released, and took top billing in the merger.)
Long story short: Twentieth Century-Fox was a dominant player in film production from 1935 until now. In 1985, Rupert and his minions scooped up the studio, making it a large part of the News. Corp. empire (and dropping the hyphen in the name.) Shortly thereafter, Fox Broadcasting was born.
Twentieth Century-Fox was one of the few Golden Age studios that didn't have a stake in animation. But today, Twentieth Century Fox (and soon-to-be Twenty-first Century Fox) are major players in animation, owning Blue Sky Studios and Fox Animation, and distributing DreamWorks Animation product.
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8 comments:
I knew this day would come, just dropping the hyphen was the first nail in the coffin!
Don't worry, the actual studio name is not changing: http://www.deadline.com/2013/04/no-name-change-for-20th-century-fox/
I don't care what the name is. They can be 19th Century Fox if they want to.
The most interesting thing to me is how a big, failing studio merged with a small, power-house studio run by Darryl Zanuck, and became hugely successful again.
And then, seventy years further on, Darryl Zanuck's son Richard partnered with a former animator (Tim Burton) on a string of successful films.
Darryl's 20th Century-Fox had no connection with animation, one of the few majors that didn't.
"Twentieth Century-Fox was one of the few Golden Age studios that didn't have a stake in animation."
While they never took the production in-house like Warner's or MGM or Paramount did, FOX was the theatrical distributor of Terrytoons from the late 1930's all the way into the 60's.
While that is true Kevin, I would side with Steve on this issue since Fox merely released those cartoons rather than to have much of a state in animation produced on it's own. That is interesting the company could love this long without it.
I appreciate that fact, Chris, but to say Fox had no absolutely stake at all in animation until the Dreamworks deal is misleading.
Fox' distributed Terrytoons like RKO distributed Disney or Columbia's distributed UPA, yet I don't think many would say the latter two didn't have any stake in animation.
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