Description
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. It is headquartered at the Fox Studio Lot in the Century City area of Los Angeles, leased from Fox Corporation. Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures distributes and markets the films produced by 20th Century Studios in theatrical markets.
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 by the merger of Fox Film Corporation 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) 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. 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.
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. 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.