Entertainment
Fox
Steven Spielberg's "West Side Story" is an anticipated upcoming Fox title.
- There are still seven Fox movies Disney has to release before 2019 is over. But what's going to happen to the 2020 slate and beyond?
- There are 14 Fox releases from 2020 through 2027 that are supposed to hit theaters, but it's possible some of those titles will not get theatrical love and find their way to Disney Plus, Disney's upcoming Netflix competitor, instead.
- Here's a breakdown of what those 14 movies are and which might get moved to a non-theatrical release.
- Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.
Mergers and acquisitions come with growing pains and it looks like right out of the gate that's what Disney is going through with buying Fox.
Disney already had the most formidable group of assets in the movie business - Marvel Studios, Lucasfilm, Pixar - before it went and gobbled up a rival studio, but the existing Fox material Disney inherited has, for a brief moment, forced the studio to cope with something it hasn't had to recently: mediocrity.
"The Fox studio performance ... was well below where it had been and well below where we'd hoped it would be when we made the acquisition," Disney CEO Bob Iger said during an earnings call earlier this week. A big reason for that $170 million quarterly loss for Fox was the epic flop of the latest X-Men movie, "Dark Phoenix."
But don't cry for Disney. In 2019, it currently has 38% of the market share at the domestic box office and five of the six top grossing movies of the year domestically are Disney titles (four of them have grossed over $1 billion worldwide).
That's why you shouldn't be surprised to see change come to Fox.
Disney currently has to deal with releasing titles that were made and ready for release before it acquired Fox. That's why before 2019 is over there are still seven Fox releases: "Ad Astra," "The Woman in the Window," "Lucy in the Sky" (Fox Searchlight), "Jojo Rabbit" (Fox Searchlight), "Ford v. Ferrari," "A Hidden Life" (Fox Searchlight), and "Spies in Disguise."
But what about 2020 and beyond?
There are still a lot of Fox titles ready to come out, including Steven Spielberg's "West Side Story" and a bunch of "Avatar" movies. But setting those bigger titles aside, will everything that's on the slate get their releases?
"I think Disney is doing exactly what they had always planned on doing - weeding out the playing field," Jeff Bock, senior box office analyst at Exhibitor Relations, told Business Insider. "I see most of these future releases going the way of Disney Plus, unless they're contractually obligated. Disney wants the best that Fox has to offer, and that's mostly their franchise films."
Below are the 14 Fox titles Disney is planning to release theatrically (for now) between 2020 and 2027: