The 20th Century Fox Story (1965-1969)

After the financial burden of the 1963 epic production "Cleopatra" which almost single handedly bankrupted the studio, 20th Century Fox was saved from total financial collapse by the end of 1965 thanks to the huge critical and box office success of the family musical "The Sound of Music." That success also proved to be the "last hurrah" for the Golden Age of the Hollywood musical as such films had very little to no place in the "New Hollywood" that was emerging by the end of the 60's. Subsequent expensive musicals/box office flops like "Doctor Dolittle" (1967), "Star" (1968) and "Hello, Dolly" (1969) came close to bankrupting the studio again. Fortunately, several big hits including "Planet of the Apes" (1968), "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" (1969), "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie" (1969) and the films of the studio's new star attraction/sex symbol Raquel Welch kept the profits flowing. Fox transitioned confidently into the new creative freedoms that the new Hollywood allowed by releasing such bold, risque and (for the time) "envelope pushing" fare like the "Derek Flint" films (1966-1967) starring James Coburn, "The Incident" (1967), "The St. Valentine's Day Massacre" (1967), "Valley of the Dolls" (1967), "The Boston Strangler" (1968), "The Detective" (1968), "Pretty Poison" (1968) and "Staircase" (1969). The studio also marked the end of another era by retiring the CinemaScope format in the late 60's as Panavision was becoming the new default widescreen format producer in Hollywood.

Fox released a total of only 109 feature films during the second half of the 60's but many of them are notable and as detailed in the above paragraph, some of them rank among the studio's all time biggest hits. Plenty of even bigger and better things would be coming from Fox in the following decades.

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