20th Century Fox History,"A Dream Is Born"

It's all started from a tiny theatre on New York's lower east side .A 25 year old William Fox amazed audiences with his magical hand craked films. The initial stages were humble – folding chairs, a painted wall for a screen -- but the aspiration to entertain and move people has been at the core of what 20th Century Fox has been doing ever since. By 1915 Fox’s five-cent movie shows were wildly popular and his single screen grew first into a chain of 25 theatres around New York City and then into a movie making business

 After a bank-mandated reorganization, under new president Sidney Kent, the new owners merged Fox Film with Twentieth Century Pictures to form The Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation. Joe Schenck and Darryl F. Zanuck retained their roles as chief executive and head of production, respectively.

The latter company was founded in 1915 by William Fox, a New York City exhibitor who had begun distributing films in 1904 and producing them in 1913. In 1915 Fox moved his studio to Los Angeles and named it the Fox Film Corporation. In 1927 the company secured the patents to a German sound-on-film process, and later that year it introduced the first sound newsreel, Fox-Movietone News. But after having borrowed heavily to finance these moves on the eve of the Great Depression, Fox lost control of his company in 1930. The company then foundered until its merger with Twentieth Century Pictures. The latter company was founded by Joseph Schenck and Darryl F. Zanuck in 1933 after Zanuck had quit as head of a production at the Warner Brothers studio. The two companies merged in 1935 to form Twentieth Century–Fox.

A court ruling meant the theatres Fox ran had to be split off into a new company Fox National Theaters. Fox bought the rights to a new projection system called CinemaScope in February 1953 and Zanuck announced that all Fox pictures would be made in this process. Fox agreed to pay conversion costs for each theater (of around $25,000 per screen). A new CinemaScope anamorphic lens was added to the front of the projector and wider format screens had to be installed. Fox gave access to the format to other studios to help convince theater owners. CinemaScope showed a brief increase in audience numbers, but the numbers began to slide after a few years.

Twentieth Century–Fox almost foundered after the box-office failure of its enormously expensive epic Cleopatra (1963), and Zanuck was brought back to serve as chief executive in place of Spyros Skouras (1942–62). Zanuck risked the company’s remaining fortunes on another epic, The Longest Day (1962), whose commercial success kept the company alive. The even greater commercial success of The Sound of Music (1965) was followed by several highly expensive flops, but the studio retrieved its fortunes with such films as Patton (1970) and M*A*S*H (1970). Later big box-office successes included The Towering Inferno (1975) and the most profitable film in the history of the industry to that time, Star Wars (1977).

In 1981 the corporation was bought by Marvin Davis and his family, who in turn, in the course of 1985, sold it to the international publisher Rupert Murdoch. Murdoch consolidated his American film and television companies under a holding company, Fox, Inc., which was overseen by the News Corporation conglomerate. In 2013 News Corporation split into separate publishing and television/film companies, called News Corporation and 21st Century Fox, respectively. Thus, 20th Century Fox came under the oversight of 21st Century Fox.