20th Century Fox history stretch back to 1915, when William Fox combined Box Office Attractions company with his distribution arm called Greater New York Film Rental (Box Office Attractions was one of the distributor of Winsor McCay's
in 1914) to form Fox Film Corporation. Headquartered in Fort Lee, New Jersey, the company made the move to California in 1926 with the purchase of 300 acres in Beverly Hills for "Movietone City," the best-equipped studio of its time. In less than three years and due to the stock market crash of 1929, William Fox was overextended and close to bankruptcy. Fox was stripped of his empire and ended up in jail. Fox Film, with more than 500 theatres, was placed in receivership.
Across town, Twentieth Century Pictures was created in 1933 by Darryl F. Zanuck, Joseph Schenck, William Goetz, and Raymond Griffith. On May 31, 1935, the two companies merged into The Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation.
For many years, 20th Century Fox had no studio animation department. Fox Film Corporation distributed Paul Terry's
TerryToons Studio beginning in 1930. The distribution deal lasted through the merger and into the late 60's. In 1977, Fox again started distributing animation, now if the form of
animated features.
In 1997, Fox opened their own animation division,
Fox Animation Studios, as a traditional animation studio. Beginning with 1997's
Anastasia, Fox saw this division as helping them match up to Disney's success in the animation realm. 20th Century Fox set up their new studio in Phoenix, and brought in Don Bluth and Gary Goldman to run it. Never quite able to compete with Disney, the studio closed in 2000 with the commercial failure of
Titan AE. The studio got a new breath of life in 2009 with the release of
Fantastic Mr. Fox.
Also in 1997, their visual effects company, VIFX, acquired
Blue Sky Studios and formed Blue Sky|VIFX. In 1999, Fox sold off VIFX, but kept Blue Sky Studios. The gamble paid off, and 2002 saw the release of
Ice Age, the studios first bona fide success. Much like their counterpart PIXAR at Disney, the CGI animation division of 20th Century Fox enjoyed a string of commercial and critical, to the exclusion of their 2D counterparts.
If there was one division of 20th Century Fox that has had a constant string of successes, it is their television animation department. From their first appearance on 1987's
The Tracey Ullman Show,
The Simpsons has shot past over five hundred aired episodes, making the animated behemoth the longest-running American sitcom, the longest-running American animated program, and, in 2009, it surpassed
Gunsmoke as the longest-running American prime-time, scripted television series. the show was initially produced at
Klasky-Csupo, then moved to
Film Roman. who produces most of Fox's television fare.
FOX president of entertainment Kevin Reilly announced in 2012 that Fox Broadcasting Company has created a new unit to oversee the development and production of alternative animated series, shorts and user-adapted material for a brand new late-night animated programming block and new digital multi-platform network. It is expected the unit will develop and produce an ambitious slate of original animated shorts and series to run both on-air and online.
