20th Century Studios, Inc., formerly Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation, is an American film production and distribution company owned by the Walt Disney Studios, the film studios division of the Disney Entertainment business segment of the Walt Disney Company. It was headquartered at the Fox Studio Lot in the Century City area of Los Angeles, until its lease with Fox Corporation ended and it was relocated to the Walt Disney Studios in Burbank. Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures distributes and markets the films produced by this studio in theatrical markets.
For over 90 years, 20th Century has been one of the major American film studios. It was founded on May 31, 1935, by the merger of Fox Film Corporation and Twentieth Century Pictures, and was one of the original "Big Five" among eight majors of Hollywood's Golden Age. In 1985, it was 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. The studio adopted its current 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. 20th Century is currently one of five live-action film studios within the Walt Disney Studios, alongside Walt Disney Pictures, Marvel Studios, Lucasfilm, and its sister speciality unit, Searchlight Pictures. 20th Century also releases animated films produced by its animation division, 20th Century Animation.
The first six Star Wars films, X-Men, Avatar, Ice Age, Alien and Planet of the Apes are 20th Century's most commercially successful franchises, while the studio's library includes many notable films such as The Sound of Music, Independence Day and Titanic, with two of the three films winning the Academy Award for Best Picture, and all of them were among the highest-grossing films of all time, with Titanic breaking the record during its initial release.
History From founding to 1956
Twentieth Century Pictures' Joseph Schenck and Darryl F. Zanuck left United Artists over a stock dispute and began merger talks with the management of financially struggling Fox Film under President Sidney Kent.
Spyros Skouras, then manager of the Fox West Coast Theaters, helped make it happen (and later became president of the new company). The company had been struggling since founder William Fox lost control of it in 1930.
Fox Film Corporation and Twentieth Century Pictures merged in 1935. Initially it was speculated in The New York Times that the newly merged company would be named Fox-Twentieth Century. The new company, Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation, began trading on May 31, 1935. Kent remained at the company, joining Schenck and Zanuck. Zanuck replaced Winfield Sheehan as the company's production chief.
The company established a special training school. Lynn Bari, Patricia Farr, and Anne Nagel were among 14 young women "launched on the trail of film stardom" on August 6, 1935, when they each received a six-month contract with Twentieth Century-Fox after spending 18 months in the school. The contracts included a studio option for renewal for as long as seven years.
For many years Twentieth Century-Fox identified itself as having been founded in 1915, which was the year that Fox Film was founded. For instance, it marked 1945 as its 30th anniversary. However, in recent years it has considered the 1935 merger as its founding date, even though most film historians agree it was launched in 1915 with the founding of Fox Film. The company's films retained the Twentieth Century Pictures searchlight logo and fanfare in the opening credits but with the name changed to Twentieth Century-Fox.
After the merger was completed, Zanuck signed young actors to help carry Twentieth Century-Fox: Tyrone Power, Linda Darnell, Carmen Miranda, Don Ameche, Henry Fonda, Gene Tierney, Sonja Henie, and Betty Grable. Twentieth Century-Fox also hired Alice Faye and Shirley Temple, who appeared in several major films for the studio in the 1930s.
Higher movie attendance during World War II helped Twentieth Century-Fox overtake RKO and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer to become the third most profitable film studio. In 1941 Zanuck was commissioned as a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Signal Corps and assigned to supervise the production of U.S. Army training films. His partner William Goetz filled in at the Twentieth Century-Fox office while he was away.
In 1942 Spyros Skouras succeeded Kent as president of the studio. During the next few years, with pictures like Wilson (1944), The Razor's Edge (1946), Boomerang, Gentleman's Agreement (both 1947), The Snake Pit (1948), and Pinky (1949), Zanuck established a reputation for provocative films for adults. Twentieth Century-Fox also specialized in adaptations of best-selling books such as Ben Ames Williams' Leave Her to Heaven (1945), starring Gene Tierney, which was the highest-grossing Twentieth Century-Fox film of the 1940s. The studio also produced film versions of Broadway musicals, including the Rodgers and Hammerstein titles, beginning with State Fair (1945), the only musical they wrote for the screen.
After the war, audiences slowly 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 numbers, Twentieth Century-Fox gambled on an unproven filming process. Noting that the two film sensations of 1952 had been in the Cinerama format, which required three projectors to fill a giant curved screen, and in "Natural Vision" 3D, which got its effects of depth by requiring the use of polarized glasses, Twentieth Century-Fox mortgaged its studio to buy the 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 film studios empty-handed, and in 1953 introduced CinemaScope with the studio's groundbreaking feature film The Robe.
Zanuck announced in February 1953 that henceforth all Twentieth Century-Fox pictures would be made in CinemaScope. To convince theater owners to install this new process, Twentieth Century-Fox agreed to help pay conversion costs (about $25,000 per screen); and to ensure enough product, Twentieth Century-Fox leased access to CinemaScope to any rival studio choosing to use it. Seeing the box-office returns for the first two CinemaScope releases, The Robe and How to Marry a Millionaire (also 1953), Warner Bros., MGM, RKO, Universal-International, Columbia, UA, Allied Artists, and Disney quickly adopted the process. In 1956 Twentieth Century-Fox engaged Robert Lippert to establish the subsidiary company Regal Pictures (later Associated Producers Incorporated) to film B movies in CinemaScope but branded as RegalScope. Twentieth Century-Fox produced new musicals using the CinemaScope process including Carousel and The King and I (both 1956).
CinemaScope resulted in a brief uptick in attendance, but by 1956 the numbers again began to slide. That year Darryl Zanuck announced his resignation as head of production. Zanuck moved to Paris and set himself up as an independent producer, seldom returning to the United States for many years. In mid-1956 the company loaned its pre-1948 film library, including TV distribution rights but not the copyrights of these titles, to National Telefilm Associates for 10 years.
Production and financial problems
Zanuck's successor, producer Buddy Adler, died a year later. President Spyros Skouras brought in a series of production executives, but none had Zanuck's success. By the early 1960s, Twentieth Century-Fox was in trouble. A new version of Cleopatra (1963) began production in 1959 with Joan Collins in the lead. As a publicity gimmick, producer Walter Wanger offered $1 million to Elizabeth Taylor if she would star; she accepted and costs for Cleopatra began to escalate. Richard Burton's on-set romance with Taylor was surrounding the media. However, Skouras' selfish preferences and inexperienced micromanagement on the film's production did nothing to speed up production on Cleopatra.
Meanwhile, another remake—of the Cary Grant hit My Favorite Wife (1940)—was rushed into production in an attempt to turn over a quick profit to help keep Twentieth Century-Fox afloat. The romantic comedy entitled Something's Got to Give paired Marilyn Monroe, Twentieth Century-Fox's most bankable star of the 1950s, with Dean Martin and director George Cukor. The troubled Monroe caused delays daily, and it quickly descended into a costly debacle. As Cleopatras budget passed $10 million, eventually costing around $40 million, Twentieth Century-Fox sold its back lot (now the site of Century City) to Alcoa in 1961 to raise funds. After several weeks of script rewrites on the Monroe picture and very little progress, mostly due to director George Cukor's filming methods, in addition to Monroe's chronic sinusitis, Monroe was fired from Something's Got to Give and two months later she was found dead. According to Twentieth Century-Fox files, she was rehired within weeks for a two-picture deal totaling $1 million, $500,000 to finish Something's Got to Give (plus a bonus at completion), and another $500,000 for What a Way to Go. Elizabeth Taylor's disruptive reign on the Cleopatra set continued unchallenged from 1960 into 1962, though three Twentieth Century-Fox executives went to Rome in June 1962 to fire her. They learned that director Joseph L. Mankiewicz had filmed out of sequence and had only done interiors, so Twentieth Century-Fox was then forced to allow Taylor several more weeks of filming. In the meantime during that summer of 1962 Fox released nearly all of its contract stars to offset burgeoning costs, including Jayne Mansfield.
With few pictures on the schedule, Skouras wanted to rush Zanuck's big-budget war epic The Longest Day (1962), an accurate account of the Allied invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944, with a huge international cast, into release as another source of quick cash. This offended Zanuck, still Twentieth Century-Fox's largest shareholder, for whom The Longest Day was a labor of love that he had dearly wanted to produce for many years. After it became clear that Something's Got to Give would not be able to progress without Monroe in the lead (Martin had refused to work with anyone else), Skouras finally decided that re-signing her was unavoidable. But days before filming was due to resume, she was found dead at her Los Angeles home and the picture resumed filming as Move Over, Darling, with Doris Day and James Garner in the leads. Released in 1963, the film was a hit. The unfinished scenes from Something's Got to Give were shelved for nearly 40 years. Rather than being rushed into release as if it were a B-picture, The Longest Day was lovingly and carefully produced under Zanuck's supervision. It was finally released at a length of three hours and was well received.