20th Century Studios, Inc. (often shortened to 20th Century; formerly known as Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation and later Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation) is an American film studio currently owned by The Walt Disney Studios, a subsidiary of the Disney Entertainment division of The Walt Disney Company. It is headquartered at the Fox Studio Lot in the Century City area of Los Angeles. Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures distributes and markets the films produced by 20th Century Studios in theatrical markets.
For over 80 years, 20th Century was one of the major American film studios. It was formed in 1935 as Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation by the merger of Fox Film and Twentieth Century Pictures, and one of the original "Big Five" among eight majors of Hollywood's Golden Age. In 1985, the studio removed the hyphen in the name (becoming Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation) after being acquired by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, which was renamed 21st Century Fox in 2013 after it spun-off its publishing assets. Disney purchased most of 21st Century Fox's assets, which included 20th Century Fox, on March 20, 2019. The studio adopted its current name as a trade name on January 17, 2020, in order to avoid confusion with Fox Corporation, and subsequently started to use it for the copyright of 20th Century and Searchlight Pictures productions on December 4.
The most well-known and commercially successful films and film series from 20th Century Studios include the first six Star Wars films, Avatar, Anastasia, Ice Age, X-Men, Die Hard, Alien, Planet of the Apes, Predator, Independence Day, and Kingsman as well as numerous television shows such as The Simpsons. Additionally, the film studio's archive includes many individual movies such as Titanic which won the Academy Award for Best Picture and was the highest grossing movie of all time for over a decade.