Walden Media keeping busy without Fox.

Two weeks ago, I speculated on the possible demise of Walden Media. My speculation was based on two things:

One, in August 2006, Walden formed a partnership with Fox which, as I understood it, required Walden to release all future films through Fox. There have been a couple of non-Fox films produced by Walden since then — such as Sony’s The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep and New Line’s Journey to the Center of the Earth — but in all such cases that I know of, those films were well into production before Walden struck its deal with Fox.

Two, it was announced in recent weeks that Fox has shut down Walden as a standalone division and “absorbed” the marketing of Fox Walden films into its regular marketing apparatus, following a short, sparse string of box-office disappointments such as The Seeker: The Dark Is Rising and City of Ember. These developments led David Poland to assert that “the end of Fox Walden as a production entity is unannounced but inevitable.”

Subsequent reports, however, have suggested that Walden Media might not be quite dead yet.

First, the Hollywood Reporter noted that Walden has hired a new vice-president of marketing who will work not only with Fox on the two films that they still have in development together — at least one of which, Tooth Fairy, “originated” at Fox and not at Walden, according to a Fox press release — but also with Summit Entertainment on Bandslam, a high-school rock-band movie starring High School Musical‘s Vanessa Hudgens.

Bandslam was shot earlier this year, according to the IMDb, so it would seem that Walden has been free to make new non-Fox movies after all. Unless, of course, Walden and Summit were to partner with Fox on this film, as they apparently did on Nim’s Island and City of Ember. But so far there is no indication of that at the IMDb or at the Walden and Summit websites.

Second, Variety and the Hollywood Reporter both reported that Walden has bought a script about the Girl Scouts, called Tough Cookies, which it will produce with Kerner Entertainment — and they also reported that this is at least the second collaboration between Walden and Kerner, following a sports movie called The Miracle of St. Anthony, which is still in development.

So it would seem that Walden is staying busy without Fox after all.

It will be interesting to see how these newer films do. Walden’s output has been very uneven, and ironically, its top-grossing films — which are not necessarily its best films — were all released by studios other than Fox. So what was it that sank the Fox Walden venture: the movies themselves, or the marketing? Who knows, but it will be interesting to see if the pattern persists.