Kane Dane
Disney purchases 21st Century Fox for almost a year, and it has its positive and negative results of this landmark deal. Disney+ has been stacked with content from X-Men, and the Fox are on their route, but people have lost their jobs, and engaging projects have been axed. Now another significant change is leading place as Disney is removing Fox’s name entirely in a complete rebranding.
Disney To Remove Fox Name
According to sources, the Walt Disney Company is drastically changing the branding for the 21st Century Fox assets the company obtained last year in a $71.3 billion agreement. The ‘Fox’ name will be withdrawn from Disney’s film assets as the mega-studio progresses into the future. The film studio 20th Century Fox will shift to 20th Century Studios, and Fox Searchlight Pictures will convert as Searchlight Pictures.
The changes are already being placed into impact too. Email addresses for workers at Fox Searchlight Pictures now finish with @searchlightpictures.com rather than @fox.com address they once used. On the advertisement for the upcoming Fox Searchlight Pictures production Downhill, which starred Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Will Ferrell, the credits read “Searchlight Pictures Presents,” and the ‘Fox’ name will not be seen.
Downhill will be releasing on Valentine’s Day and will be the first Searchlight film to take the new Fox-less logo. On the 20th Century Fox view of things, the Harrison Ford movie The Call of the Wild will debut under the new 20th Century branding. These new logos will mainly preserve the aesthetic of their predecessors, sans the Fox, of course.
Thankfully, although the name of Fox will be missing a word and the design will be somewhat changed, it appears that the 20th Century logo will hold the swirling klieg lights and glorious fanfare that made the logo such an iconic character of film culture. The 20th Century Fox logo represented in front of classics movies like the original Star Wars, Avatar, and Home Alone, and although the Fox is finished, at least we can still look ahead to hear that music when we went to the theater.
So although Disney is keeping the studios around, providing the company to offer different and more adult fare that would not fit under the family-friendly Disney logo, the Fox branding is being deleted, at least on the cinematic side of things.
Final Decision Not Made
What is unknown as of now is whether or not this change will also happen at the small screen level. A final resolution has yet to be made regarding 20th Century Fox Television or Fox 21 Television Studios, but negotiations are underway on that concern.
When Disney bought the 21st Century Fox’s assets from Fox Corp., it did not purchase every single thing held by Fox that sported the Fox name. The Fox broadcast network and Fox News endured under Fox Corp., and that could guide to some confusion regarding what’s what and who owns what.
Disney desires to be fully in control of its assets and how they are perceived in the marketplace, and with two Fox’s roaming around, that wasn’t possible. So Disney will move ahead with Searchlight Pictures and 20th Century Studios.
