Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corp.

Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corp.

U.S. movie studio. It was formed in 1935 by the merger of Twentieth Century Pictures (founded in 1933 by Joseph Schenck and Darryl F. Zanuck) and the Fox Film Corp. (founded in 1915 by William Fox). The new studio produced mainly westerns and musicals into the 1940s, as well as notable films such as The Grapes of Wrath (1940) and The Snake Pit (1948). In 1953 it introduced CinemaScope with The Robe, and later in the decade it made hits such as The King and I (1956) and South Pacific (1958). After the expensive failure of Cleopatra (1963), the studio recouped with The Sound of Music (1965), Patton (1970), M*A*S*H (1970), and Star Wars (1977), the film industry's most profitable movie to that time. In 1981 the company was bought by the oil magnate Marvin Davis, who resold it in 1985 to Rupert Murdoch. Murdoch consolidated his American film and television companies under a holding company, Fox, Inc.