Fox Entertainment CEO Rob Wade Lays Out New Structure, Future Plans and the Fate of Third-Party Shows Like ‘9-1-1: Lone Star’

variety.com:

Michael Schneider Variety Editor at Large It’s been more than a year and a half since Rob Wade took over as CEO of Fox Entertainment.

On Monday at the Banff World Media Festival, Wade made his first extensive public comments about how it’s been going so far — and elaborated on any new acquisition plans he might have for the company, the fate of some of the third party shows still on his air (including “9-1-1: Lone Star”) and the decision behind his recent corporate restructuring network, studio and distribution operations into their own divisions.

In a conversation prior to the panel, Wade noted that in the five years since the 20th Century Fox TV assets were sold to Disney, leaving Fox as an independent network, the company has built up a new stable of production businesses — including animation studio Bento Box (“Krapopolis,” “Grimsburg”), unscripted studio Fox Alternative Entertainment (“The Masked Singer,” “I Can See Your Voice”), Fox Scripted Studios (“Animal Control”), MarVista Entertainment (Hallmark Channel’s “The Way Home”), Studio Ramsay Global (“Next Level Chef”) and TMZ. “We kind of built them, loosely structured around scripted and unscripted, but it was kind of more a fluid organization,” he says. “We basically built up enough scale and I think now was the right time to put them together in more traditional structure.” That meant creating three oversights: the Fox TV network under prexy Michael Thorn; Fox Entertainment Studios, where all of those production units now live, under head Fernando Szew; and the sales division Fox Entertainment Global, which is on the hunt for a permanent leader. “So, taking the network businesses as a one piece, taking the studio businesses as a group as another and then really.