FoxNext

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

~ the last words ~

On 18 January 2017 Twentieth Century Fox announced a new division and named Salil Mehta to run it. FoxNext was supposed to collect everything the studio did that was not a film or a TV show: the mobile games unit that ran The Simpsons: Tapped Out, the console side that had put out Alien: Isolation, the virtual reality slate, and the theme park licensing business that had Fox-branded parks on the drawing board in three countries.

It spent money fast, which was the point. A VR slate was announced the day after launch with Chris Milk's company Within. In June 2017 it bought Aftershock Studios, the Los Angeles and San Francisco teams that had come out of Kabam, and put Aaron Loeb in charge of FoxNext Games. Cold Iron Studios was acquired in January 2018 to build an Aliens shooter. Fogbank Entertainment was stood up two months after that, in March 2018.

The output was real. Marvel Strike Force, built by the former Aftershock team, became a genuinely large mobile game. Crisis on the Planet of the Apes shipped for VR headsets in April 2018. Three weeks after that, FoxNext opened Alien: Descent, a free-roaming VR attraction in a mall in Orange County, California.

Then Disney bought 21st Century Fox, and the clock started.

~ the record ~

~ the parks that were never built ~

The theme park half is the part most people forget. Fox licensed its brand to Genting in Malaysia for a 300 million dollar park with 25 rides on 25 acres, and to Village Roadshow for 75 acres inside an entertainment complex in Changwon City, South Korea. The Al Ahli Holding deal signed in November 2015 covered a park near Dubai and gave the group rights to four Fox Worlds outside the United States in total. Al Ahli put the Dubai project on indefinite hold on 29 April 2018, with its chief executive saying out loud that there was already a serious supply of theme parks in the city, and the two sides settled out of court in July 2019.

None of this was ever a thing you could buy from Turkey. The closest the division got to a consumer product here was a mobile game with Marvel characters on it. The only piece of FoxNext that crossed the border was the piece that fits on a phone and needs no building.

~ how disney unwound it ~

Disney had already decided, years before, that it did not want to make video games. It closed Disney Interactive Studios in 2016 and went to a pure licensing model, and when Fox's games operation landed in its lap it applied the same policy. By September 2019 Disney was signaling that parts of FoxNext would be sold or shut.

In January 2020 it sold FoxNext Games to the mobile publisher Scopely, which took the Los Angeles studio that had been Aftershock along with Cold Iron and most of the intellectual property the two had built. The price has never been disclosed. Fogbank Entertainment, less than two years old, was shuttered later the same month. The division formally ended on 23 January 2020, three years and five days after Variety announced it.

The pieces kept moving afterward. Scopely sold Cold Iron on to Daybreak, and the Aliens shooter that had been started inside FoxNext finally shipped in 2021 as Aliens: Fireteam Elite. foxnext.com does not resolve.

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