By any other name: Disney drops Fox name from studios
LOS ANGELES — Sound the trumpets: Twentieth Century Fox, a name and klieglit logo that stretches back 85 years in Hollywood, is dropping the word Fox, a move that may prevent consumers mistakenly thinking the movie studio has anything to do Rupert Murdoch’s polarizing Fox News media empire.
The Walt Disney Co. bought most of Murdoch’s entertainment assets last year in a $71.3 billion deal. That included the Twentieth Century Fox studio and its art-house sibling, Fox Searchlight. On Friday, employees at the main movie studio arrived to a new email format (@20thcenturystudios) without the Fox. A Disney spokesman confirmed that both labels, now officially known as Twentieth Century Studios and Searchlight Pictures, would drop Fox from their logos. Disney had no further comment.
“Downhill,” a comedic drama starring Will Ferrell and Julia Louis-Dreyfus, will be the first movie to bear the Searchlight Pictures name. It arrives in theaters Feb. 14. “The Call of the Wild,” set for release Feb. 21 and starring Harrison Ford, will carry the Twentieth Century logo. The trumpet fanfare (composed by Alfred Newman in 1933), klieg lights and familiar monolith logo will remain.
It is not surprising that Disney would rename the movie operations. In October, Twentieth Century Fox Television, a small-screen studio that Disney bought as part of the deal, became part of a new entity, Disney Television Studios.
Murdoch still owns the Fox broadcast network, Fox News and a chain of 28 local Fox television stations, among other media assets. His new company is called Fox Corp., and one of his sons, Lachlan Murdoch, is chief executive. (The old company was called Twenty-First Century Fox.)
The Fox brand became synonymous with Murdoch starting in the mid-1980s, when he bought a stake in the Twentieth Century Fox movie studio and founded the Fox broadcast network to compete with ABC, CBS and NBC. He eventually took full control of the movie studio. Fox News arrived on the cable scene in 1996 as an alternative to CNN and grew into a behemoth that dwarfed the film company as a moneymaker.
Fox News remains a media superpower, but its brand has become a polarizing one. The network’s founding chairman, Roger Ailes, and one of its most popular on-air personalities, Bill O’Reilly, became the focus of sexual harassment scandals in recent years.
Hollywood figures have grown more vocal in their criticism of Fox News. In 2018, for instance, Steve Levitan, creator of “Modern Family,” which airs on ABC but is produced by the Fox studio that Disney now owns, wrote on Twitter that he was “disgusted to work at a company that has anything whatsoever to do with @FoxNews.”
Movies have been branded with the Fox name for more than a century. The name dates to 1915, when William Fox, a Hungarian immigrant, left the fur and garment industry to start a motion picture company. The 1929 stock market crash, among other misfortunes, forced Fox Film Corp. to merge with a competitor, Twentieth Century Pictures in 1935.