20th Century Studios
20th Century Studios, Inc. is an American film studio owned by the Walt Disney Studios, a division of Disney Entertainment, in turn a division of The Walt Disney Company.[6] It is headquartered at the Fox Studio Lot in the Century City area of Los Angeles, leased from Fox Corporation.[7] Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures distributes and markets the films produced by 20th Century Studios in theatrical markets.[8]
This article is about the 1935 film studio. For the companies before the merger, see Fox Film and Twentieth Century Pictures.20th Century Studios
- Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation
(1935–1985) - Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation
(1985–2020)
Film
May 31, 1935
Fox Studio Lot Building 88, 10201 West Pico Boulevard,
,Worldwide
- David Greenbaum (president)
- Steve Asbell (president, production)
- Motion pictures
- Television films
2,300 (2018)
- 20th Century Animation
- 20th Century Family
- 20th Century Games
- 20th Century Comics
For over 80 years, 20th Century was one of the major American film studios. It was formed in 1935 as Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation[a] by the merger of Fox Film and Twentieth Century Pictures, and one of the original "Big Five" among eight majors of Hollywood's Golden Age. In 1985, the studio removed the hyphen in the name (becoming Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation)[b] after being acquired by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, which was renamed 21st Century Fox in 2013 after it spun-off its publishing assets. Disney purchased most of 21st Century Fox's assets, which included 20th Century Fox, on March 20, 2019.[9] The studio adopted its current name as a trade name on January 17, 2020, in order to avoid confusion with Fox Corporation, and subsequently started to use it for the copyright of 20th Century and Searchlight Pictures productions on December 4.[10]
The most commercially successful film series from 20th Century Studios include the first six Star Wars films, X-Men, Ice Age, Avatar, and Planet of the Apes.[11] Additionally, the studio's library includes many individual films such as Titanic and The Sound of Music, both of which won the Academy Award for Best Picture and became the highest-grossing films of all time during their initial releases.[12][13]
Radio
The Twentieth Century Fox Presents radio series[109] were broadcast between 1936 and 1942. More often than not, the shows were a radio preview featuring a medley of the songs and soundtracks from the latest movie being released into the theaters, much like the modern-day movie trailers we now see on TV, to encourage folks to head down to their nearest Picture House.
The radio shows featured the original stars, with the announcer narrating a lead-up that encapsulated the performance.
Motion picture film processing
From its earliest ventures into movie production, Fox Film Corporation operated its own processing laboratories. The original lab was located in Fort Lee, New Jersey along with the studios. A lab was included with the new studio built in Los Angeles in 1916.[110] Headed by Alan E. Freedman, the Fort Lee lab was moved into the new Fox Studios building in Manhattan in 1919.[111] In 1932, Freedman bought the labs from Fox for $2,000,000 to bolster what at that time was a failing Fox liquidity.[112][113] He renamed the operation "DeLuxe Laboratories," which much later became Deluxe Entertainment Services Group. In the 1940s Freedman sold the labs back to what was then 20th Century Fox and remained as president into the 1960s. Under Freedman's leadership, DeLuxe added two more labs in Chicago and Toronto and processed film from studios other than Fox, such as UA and Universal.