Disney's Fox cancellation spree may end up saving us from some dire-sounding video game movies
It’s been rough days at the recently assimilated 20th Century Fox movie studio of late, as new corporate overlord Bob Iger—apparently accustomed to box office receipts that are a bit more Avengers, and a bit less X-Men—blasted Disney’s newly schlorped-up subordinate for massively undershooting its earnings expectations. (As to how much of that failure can be attributed to the company’s wide-scale firing of Fox’s long-time marketers and support staff, in favor of Disney operatives who already had their own workloads and films to deal with, well: Who can say?) We reported earlier this week on Iger’s attempt to put a positive spin on its latest Fox-related chainsawing—including that Disney+ revival of Home Alone that the universe had apparently been clamoring for—but we’re a lot more interested today in Iger’s declaration that Disney would be, per Variety, “tossing the majority of projects in development” at the studio. As with any major studio, “all projects in development” at Fox was a pretty massive number—somewhere in the neighborhood of 270 prospective films, most of which hadn’t gotten much further than a basic idea and one or two attached names—and so there’s been a lot of scrambling this week to try to figure out which movies are actually getting the cut.