What Really Grinds My Gears: 20th Century Studios (updated)

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Wanna know what grinds my gears? The 2020 rebrand of 20th Century Fox to 20th Century Studios.

This rebrand is the New Coke of the film industry. 

I think that because it disrespects the legacy of William Fox, and since it is so unconventional compared to other acquisitions.

A little backstory about this company. Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation was founded in 1935, as a result of a merger between Fox Film Corporation and 20th Century Pictures, Inc. 

Fox Film was founded in 1915 by William Fox, a successful businessman who owned a handful of nickelodeons (5¢ theaters, also the origin of the name of the network that brought you SpongeBob SquarePants). Those nickelodeons were all in the New York area, and was owned by a company called the Fox Office Attractions Company, a play on words (Box Office; Fox rhymes with Box). This company would later on become Fox Film, as a company merged with another company owned by Fox, a film distributor, Greater New York Film Rental.

This is the first logo of Fox Film, circa 1915.

20th Century Pictures, Inc was founded by ex-United Artists president Joseph Schenck and ex-Warner exec Darryl F. Zanuck in 1933. This company used a logo that may seem familiar to some.

From: The Call Of The Wild (1935), the last film released by 20th Century Pictures before its merger with Fox.

In 1935, these companies would merge, forming the 20th Century-Fox Film Corporation. The 20th Century Pictures logo would be altered to reflect this merger.

This is the 1935 logo. Notice that the name FOX is now on the structure.

In the 50s, 20th Century-Fox, alongside William Fox-founded Deluxe Laboratories, created the CinemaScope ratio, still used today in the film industry. With this innovation, a new logo was created, with a tilted 0.

This was the logo for CinemaScope releases, which added another section with strings to the famous fanfare, composed by Alfred Newman. Everyone knows the fanfare, so I won't link it here.

In the 1980s, the designer of the previous logo, Rocky Longo, designed a new logo, which is the basis for the later computer generated logos following it.

Around this time, Rupert Murdoch acquired the studio, renaming it to "20th Century Fox Film Corporation", dropping the hyphen, and started a network named after the recently-acquired company, alongside the acquisition of the TV stations owned by Metromedia Inc. Other than that, in 1994, Studio Productions, now known as Flip Your Lid Animation, created the most iconic logo for 20th Century Fox, the 1st computer generated logo of TCF. That's right, I'm talking about this legendary logo:

Alongside the release of Fox's highest-grossing movie, and the highest-grossing movie of all time, James Cameron's Avatar, Blue Sky Studios, the animation studio of TCF, introduced this masterclass of a remastered logo:

But unfortunately, Disney did the unthinkable, and defaced the logo, and in 2020 of all years, by rebranding this award-winning studio as the soulless, bland:

And Disney has been turning them into a laughingstock, by making a TERRIBLE Home Alone reboot, and some shawty films with no rewatch value. AND Avatar: The Way Of Water.

Speaking of which, the 4K Blu-Ray and the theatrical re-release of the first Avatar film replaced (plastered) the original 20th Century Fox logo with the 20th Century Studios logo, even though Disney said that films prior to 2020 would keep the original Fox logos. Heck, they even plastered the Fox logo on international prints of the 25th Anniversary Edition of Titanic (1997), another James Cameron film. I guess Disney has been screwing him and fans of his work for 20th Century Fox over.

Thanks for reading!