Studio Report Cards: 20th Century Fox

TheWrap has done a series of Studio Report Cards assessing how well — or not — the major studios did in terms of box office performance in 2010. I’ll be featuring excerpts from those articles each day for the next week or so. Today: 20th Century Fox:

Fox
Grade: C
Take away the revenue that 2009 film “Avatar” made for the studio in the first half of calendar year, and this could have been ugly. Fox didn’t have a single film ranked in the top 20 domestic revenue earners this year. (The Steve Carell/Tina Fey comedy “Date Night” came closest, ranking 23rd with $98.7 million in North American receipts.)

Fox — as one executive close to the studio puts it — had a year full of singles and doubles, mixed with a few strikeouts. But what it really lacked was a home run.

To keep the baseball analogy going, much of the studio’s calendar-year revenue actually came from a game-seven-winning grand slam, with James Cameron’s “Avatar” grossing most of its record-breaking $2.77 billion in theatrical revenue in the first half of 2010. 

But a year that started off with so much exuberance is ending on a sour note for Fox, with $155 million “Chronicles of Narnia: Voyage of the Dawn Treader” only grossing $168.6 million globally after two weeks, and $115 million Jack Black comedy “Gulliver’s Travels” enduring decidedly weak pre-release tracking going into its Christmas Day premiere.

In between “Avatar” and “Gulliver’s Travels,” Fox released 21 movies, none of which lost much money (the Owen Wilson talking-dog comedy “Marmaduke” was the big bleeder at $15 million), but none brought huge profits, either.

Fox — as one executive close to the studio puts it — had a year full of singles and doubles, mixed with a few strikeouts. But what it really lacked was a home run.

Tomorrow: Sony.

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