Fox mortgaged its studio on CinemaScope, then sold its back lot for Cleopatra
In 1953, with cinema audiences halved since 1946, Twentieth Century-Fox bet its own lot on a French widescreen lens system and won. A decade later the runaway budget of Cleopatra, about 40 million dollars, forced it to sell the land that became Century City in Los Angeles.
The studio was born on May 31, 1935, when Joseph Schenck and Darryl F. Zanuck of Twentieth Century Pictures merged with the ailing Fox Film, which had been struggling since William Fox lost control in 1930. Its founding date is itself disputed: for years the company counted from Fox Film's 1915 start, celebrating a 30th anniversary in 1945, before settling on 1935 even though most historians prefer the earlier year. The searchlight logo and fanfare came from the Twentieth Century side.
Zanuck ran production and built a roster of contract stars, from Henry Fonda to Shirley Temple, and in the 1940s gained a name for provocative films aimed at adults. Wartime attendance lifted Fox past RKO and MGM to become the third most profitable studio.
Television and a court-ordered split from its cinema chain changed that. Seeing the 1952 successes of three-projector Cinerama and glasses-based 3D, president Spyros Skouras secured the rights to Henri Chrétien's anamorphic system, which gave a hint of depth without glasses. CinemaScope debuted with The Robe in 1953. Fox helped theatres pay roughly 25,000 dollars per screen to convert and licensed the process to rivals, and most other studios, Disney included, soon adopted it.
The boost was short-lived. Zanuck quit as production head in 1956 and moved to Paris. Cleopatra, begun in 1959, ballooned once Elizabeth Taylor accepted a million-dollar offer; executives who flew to Rome to fire her found the director had shot only interiors, out of sequence. Marilyn Monroe was dismissed from Something's Got to Give, rehired, then found dead days before filming resumed. Since 1985 the studio has passed from Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation to Disney, which bought it in 2019, and it dropped Fox from its name on January 17, 2020.
Source: 20th Century Studios
