This combination photo shows Fox News chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch at the WSJ Magazine 2017 Innovator Awards in New York on Nov. 1, 2017, left, and Disney CEO Bob Iger at the Oscars in Los Angeles on March 4, 2018. Disney’s $71.3 billion acquisition of Fox’s entertainment assets is set to close around 12 a.m. EDT on Wednesday. (AP Photo)
NEW YORK (AP) – The Fox Studio backlot, first built in 1926 on a Culver City ranch in Los Angeles, was enormous. Before much of it was sold off in the 1960s, it was four times the size of its current, and still huge, 53 acres.
Shirley Temple’s bungalow still sits on the lot, as does the piano where John Williams composed, among other things, the score to “Star Wars.” A waiter in the commissary might tell you where Marilyn Monroe once regularly sat.
When the Walt Disney Co.’s $71.3 billion acquisition of Fox is completed at 12:02 a.m. Wednesday, the storied lot – the birthplace of CinemaScope, “The Sound of Music” and “Titanic” – will no longer house one of the six major studios. It will become the headquarters for Rupert Murdoch’s new Fox Corp., (he is keeping Fox News and Fox Broadcasting) and Fox’s film operations, now a Disney label, will stay on for now as renters under a seven-year lease agreement.
The history of Hollywood is littered with changes of studio ownership; even Fox Film Corporation founder William Fox, amid the Depression, lost control of the studio that still bears his name. But the demise of 20th Century Fox as a standalone studio is an epochal event in Hollywood, one that casts long shadows over a movie industry grappling with new digital competitors from Silicon Valley and facing the possibility of further contraction. After more than eight decades of supremacy, the Big Six are down one.
The exterior of Fox Studios is pictured, Tuesday, March 19, 2019, in Los Angeles. Disney’s $71.3 billion acquisition of Fox’s entertainment assets is set to close around 12 a.m. EDT on Wednesday. (AP Photo/Chris Pizzello)
“It’s a sad day for students of film history and I think it’s potentially a sad day for audiences too,” said Tom Rothman, former chairman of Fox and the current chief of Sony Pictures. “There will just be less diversity in the marketplace.”