21st Century Fox

» see 21cf.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Twenty-First Century Fox, Inc. came into existence on 28 June 2013, the day News Corporation split itself in two. Shareholders had approved the separation on 11 June. The publishing side kept the News Corp name and the newspapers, and everything that made serious money in film and television went into the new company. Murdoch had announced the name on 16 April 2013, the reasoning being that the studio brand it leaned on was already eighty years old and cost nothing to reuse.

It held the 20th Century Fox film studio and the Fox Broadcasting Company. Fox News was in there too, by then the most-watched cable news network in America, and FX alongside it. Another line on the inventory was 73 percent of National Geographic Partners. Star India came with the rest, a television business whose audience at home no American network could match. In its final full year the company reported 30.4 billion dollars of revenue and employed 22,400 people out of 1211 Avenue of the Americas in Manhattan.

Disney agreed to buy the entertainment assets on 14 December 2017 for 52.4 billion dollars in stock. The day after a US court cleared the AT&T purchase of Time Warner, Comcast came in over the top with 65 billion in cash, on 13 June 2018. Disney went back on 20 June and made it 71.3 billion. Shareholders approved on 27 July, and the deal closed at two minutes past midnight Eastern on 20 March 2019.

The one piece of this company that sat in Turkish living rooms was the television channel. News Corporation bought TGRT from İhlas Holding on 23 July 2006 and relaunched it as FOX on 24 February 2007, which put the word on the national free-to-air dial here for the next seventeen years. It moved into 21st Century Fox in the 2013 split and went to Disney in the 2019 sale. The name finally came off on 12 February 2024, during a newscast, when the channel became NOW. The holding company was an abstraction in Turkey. The three letters were not, and you did not need cable or a subscription to find them.

~ the case file ~

~ the split that made it ~

News of the World closed in July 2011 over phone hacking, and the two years that followed were the most expensive of Murdoch's career in Britain. The 2013 split was read at the time as exactly what it looked like: the film and television business, which was growing and which nobody was investigating, got its own stock ticker and its own board, and the newspapers were put in a separate company where their problems stayed their own.

That arrangement worked on its own terms. It also produced something nobody was asking for in 2013, which was a single entertainment company with no newspapers attached to it, clean enough to be valued and sold in one piece. Four years later somebody did exactly that.

~ the auction ~

The six days in June 2018 are the part worth remembering. Comcast's 65 billion was cash against Disney's stock, and it forced Disney to restructure its own offer inside a week. Brian Roberts then withdrew on 19 July and spent the money on Sky instead, winning it in a rare UK Takeover Panel auction on 22 September 2018 at more than 30 billion pounds, outbidding the Fox stake he had just lost. Two of the largest media transactions of the decade were settled in about a hundred days by the same two bidders.

Fox Corporation was carved out before the close and started trading on 19 March 2019, one day ahead of the sale. It kept Fox News and the broadcast network. It also kept the sports operation, which was the piece that made the arithmetic work, because live American football does not depend on a catalog or on anybody abroad. Disney took the studios and the international channels.

~ what the word was worth ~

On 17 January 2020 Disney renamed the studio 20th Century Studios, and Fox Searchlight became Searchlight Pictures. The stated reason was confusion with Fox Corporation, which now owned the news brand and had every reason to keep it. So a name that had been on film prints since 1935 came off in an afternoon because a cable news network across town had a better claim to it. Alfred Newman's fanfare stayed.

~ the paperwork ~

The company did not evaporate at 12:02 in the morning. Disney kept the legal entity as a subsidiary and renamed it TFCF Corporation, which is the old Nasdaq ticker with the word Corporation attached, the ticker itself having stood for Twenty-First Century Fox. There are filings under that name years after the brand disappeared from the public world.

Some of what Disney bought it later closed. Blue Sky Studios in Connecticut, which made the Ice Age films and had come across in the deal, was shut in April 2021 with around 450 people out of work. Fox 2000, the division behind Hidden Figures and Life of Pi, was wound down almost immediately. A company assembled in 2013 to be a company was, by 2021, an inventory that its new owner was still sorting through, building by building.

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