Fox Hands Out Unlikely Release Dates; Fox Atomic Folding?

In what Variety touts as a stepped-up effort to create a year-round event-movie calendar, 20th Century Fox has announced it will open three high-profile titles, Date Night, Percy Jackson and The Tooth Fairy, in the early months of 2010.

Separately, semi-official rumors earlier this week seem to have confirmed that Fox also plans to fold Fox Atomic, a horror and comedy genre division, into the main label. The move follows a corporate shakeup earlier this year in the entertainment divisions of News Corp., the owner of Fox. 

The decision to open Date Night, the much-discussed Tina Fey-Steve Carell collaboration, on April 9, 2010 rather than a summer date as some had expected has been cast as a strategic attempt to capitalize on strong off-season box-office returns this year. The same goes for The Tooth Fairy, a family vehicle for Dwayne Johnson, and Percy Jackson, a potential new book-to-film franchise from the helmer of Home Alone and the first two Harry Potter movies. They will open, respectively, in January and February 2010. 

Fox Atomic, the distributor of movies like 28 Weeks Later and Turistas, had a few marginal hits but never really took off. Similar to Rouge Pictures, which Universal sold off earlier this year, the label had been created to focus on horror and comedy titles with narrower audiences than at the mainstream end of the studio.