In announcing its decision to rename 20th firm Fox – instead of 20th Century Fox – the firm recently acquired from Rupert Murdoch, the Walt Disney Company did not fail to ignite social media and online news sites. Sorrowful spirits couldn’t help but shed a tear over a piece of Hollywood history and saw new evidence of Disney’s hegemonic ambitions. “The mouse officially killed the fox” (fox in English), headline Variety January 17.
The operation has not yet been confirmed and the historic logos of 20th Century Fox, Fox 2000 Pictures and Fox Searchlight Pictures continue to appear on the home page of the official Disney website, in the “Our Businesses” section. “. Anyway, the information seems very serious. It is not a question here of questioning it, but of explaining why – no matter to the usual Mickey Mouse slayers – the name change had become inevitable.
It was on July 27, 2018, after a stock market rebound battle with Comcast, that the shareholders of 21st Century Fox and the Walt Disney Company validated the sale and the repurchase of the assets of the media group, for an amount of $ 71.3 billion. Ten days earlier, Comcast had announced its decision not to outbid the latest Disney offer. The transaction was finalized on March 20, 2019, after a number of competition and financial market authorities, both in Europe and in South America, gave the green light.
Meanwhile, the 1st January 2019, Rupert Murdoch created Fox Corporation to consolidate the remains of his former empire, starting with the Fox News chain, created in 1996 and renowned for its commitment to Donald Trump as values of the most conservative American right. He entrusted the management to his son, Lachlan Murdoch. In the transitional period, the reorganization project was known as “New Fox”, which at the same time displayed the Murdochs’ desire to claim the Fox name and made it clear that Fox News would be the flag. No wonder, incidentally, nothing unexpected: Fox’s name has long been commonly used to refer to the various businesses of the Australian tycoon, united in 2013 as the 21st Century Fox. There was talk of “Fox”, both for film and for satellite or cable television, the main lines of business of the Fox Entertainment Group, the parent company of 20th Century Fox.
From William Fox to “the Fox”
This simple and sonorous name is the surname of William Fox (1879-1952), founder in 1915 of the Fox Film Corporation. More specifically, it is the Americanized version by the emigration services of its original Hungarian name: Vilmos Fuchs. He was barely nine months old when his parents landed in New York. Silent pioneer, seriously challenged by the crisis of 1929 and the arrival of the speaker, William Fox, bankrupt, had to merge, in 1935, with 20th Century Pictures, a production company created two years earlier by Joseph M Schenk and Daryl F. Zanuck. It was around this time that the prestigious name of 20th Century-Fox dates, with a dash that only disappeared during the Murdoch era.
It was in the 1990s that the Fox Broadcasting Company established itself in the American audiovisual landscape, and in the 2000s that it popularized slogans in its name: “Fox Now” in 2002, “Fox On” in 2007, “So Fox” in 2008 – Fox now! The Fox! So much Fox! It was simply not possible, for Disney, to let the public continue to speak of “Fox” for one of its subsidiaries, whereas with the creation of Fox Corporation, which occurred between the formal vote of the shareholders and the finalization of the transaction, the name had become that of a company not only competing but politically very connoted.
The evolution was moreover eminently predictable and, so to speak, programmed. It even had a precedent. When Disney CEO Michael Eisner acquired Fox Family, another Rupert Murdoch channel, in 2001, it was immediately renamed ABC Family, named after the company’s main television affiliate. At the time, it hardly moved the public, with the exception of nostalgics for the televangelist Pat Robertson, who had founded it in 1961 under the name of CBN for Christian Broadcasting Network. But Rupert Murdoch had already reoriented the programming, Disney had agreed to preserve his family niche and, above all, it seemed natural to dissociate it from the Fox network. The situation is not that different today, even if it has more symbolic significance since it affects a historic label.
The brand is a big deal in the creative industry. No confusion on the matter can be admitted. As the Murdochs continued to thrive on a name which, once disassociated from 20th Century by the removal of the famous dash, made their success in the American press, Disney had no choice but to dissociate itself from it. If the memory of William Fox disappears in the passing of the current events of the cinema, it owes it less to the appetite of the mouse than to the place that Rupert Murdoch gave to his name in the media – a place in which Disney n never wished to associate, and that a son of Hungarian emigrants might well reprove.
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