HOLLYWOOD -- When News Corp. President Peter Chernin was taking a victory lap last week after the company reported a 27 percent jump in its fiscal fourth-quarter net income, he took pains to credit the 20th Century Fox Film Group for much of the good news.

He also predicted healthy future earnings, pointing to such upcoming summer 2009 films as "X-Men Origins: Wolverine" and "Night at the Museum II: Escape From the Smithsonian."

For Hollywood insiders, it was telling that Chernin -- perhaps the savviest showbiz mogul of our era -- somehow failed to mention any of his studio's movies from this summer.

And with good reason. This is the first summer since 1997 that Fox hasn't had a $100 million box-office hit. For 10 consecutive summers, the Fox assembly line churned out every kind of hit imaginable, from "X-Men" movies to "Dr. Dolittle" and "Big Momma's House" family comedies to "The Simpsons Movie."

Built around intense fiscal discipline and tight creative control, Fox has been a studio that rarely made a false move.

If the studio continues to hire pliable, easy-to-control talent, it might discover that today's youthful audience, always on the prowl for something exciting and new and strangely different, will leave the studio behind.