20th Century Studios, formerly (1935?85) Twentieth Century?Fox Film Corporation (20th Century?Fox Film Corporation)and (1985?2020) Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation (20th Century Fox Film Corporation), major American film studio formed in 1935 by the merger of Twentieth Century Pictures and the Fox Film Corporation. Since 2019 it has been a subsidiary of the Disney Company. Headquarters are in Los Angeles. Origins William Fox was a New York City exhibitor who began distributing films in 1904 and producing them in 1913. In 1915 he 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. Having borrowed heavily to finance these moves on the eve of the Great Depression, Fox lost control of his company in 1930. The studio 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 production at the Warner Brothers studio. The two companies merged in 1935 to form Twentieth Century?Fox. Early films and CinemaScope From 1935 to 1971 (except for 1956?61), Zanuck was head of production for the studio. In the late 1930s and ?40s Twentieth Century?Fox produced mainly westerns, musicals, screen biographies, and religious epics. Among its early efforts were several of director John Ford?s best-known films, notably The Grapes of Wrath (1940). The company?s early musicals featured Shirley Temple and then Betty Grable. It subsequently produced several important social dramas, such as Gentlemen?s Agreement (1947) and The Snake Pit (1948). Despite such successes, however, the studio?s productions were often criticized for lacking the style and excitement of films made by rival studios, notably Warner Brothers and MGM. A noteworthy development during this period was the creation of 20th Century Fox Television in 1949. However, it was a separate company from the film studio. In 1953 Twentieth Century?Fox introduced CinemaScope, the process by which a picture is projected on a screen two and a half times as wide as it is high; the company?s first wide-screen feature film, The Robe (1953), began the trend toward the use of wide screens in motion-picture theatres. Twentieth Century?Fox was the studio that brought Marilyn Monroe to stardom in the 1950s. Among the studio?s most successful musicals of the decade were The King and I (1956) and South Pacific (1958).