Cinema of the United States

The cinema of the United States, often generally referred to as Hollywood, has had a profound effect on cinema across the world since the early 20th century. Its history is sometimes separated into four main periods: the silent film era (1894-1927), classical Hollywood cinema (1927-1963) (referred to as The Golden Age, beginning with the talkies), New Hollywood (1964-1982), and the contemporary period (1982-to present). While the French Lumière Brothers are generally credited with the birth of modern cinema, it is American cinema that soon became the most dominant force in an emerging industry. Since the 1920s, the American film industry has grossed more money every year than that of any other country in the world.

In 1878, Eadweard Muybridge demonstrated the power of photography to capture motion. In 1894, the world's first commercial motion picture exhibition was given in New York City, using Thomas Edison's Kinetoscope. The United States was in the forefront of sound film development in the following decades. Since the early 20th century, the U.S. film industry has largely been based in and around Hollywood, Los Angeles, California. Picture City, Florida was also a planned site for a movie picture production center in the 1920s, but due to the 1928 Okeechobee hurricane, the idea collapsed and Picture City returned to its original name of Hobe Sound. Director D. W. Griffith was central to the development of film grammar. Orson Welles's Citizen Kane (1941) is frequently cited in critics' polls as the greatest film of all time.

American screen actors like: John Wayne, Clark Gable, James Dean, Humphrey Bogart and Marlon Brando have become iconic figures and US pop culture legends. The major film studios of Hollywood are the primary source of the most commercially successful movies in the world, such as Gone with the Wind (1939), Star Wars (1977), Titanic (1997), and Avatar (2009). Today, American film studios collectively generate several hundred movies every year, making the United States one of the most prolific producers of films in the world.