Fox Film Corporation

American film studio, one of the major companies of the silent era and the direct ancestor of 20th Century Fox. Founded by William Fox in 1915, it was a leading producer and distributor through the 1920s. It produced F.W. Murnau's Sunrise (1927), one of the most acclaimed films of the silent era, and introduced the Movietone sound-on-film system. The company merged with Twentieth Century Pictures in 1935 to form Twentieth Century-Fox.