Cinema of the United States

Cinema of the United States (Hollywood)
The Hollywood Sign in the Hollywood Hills, often regarded as the symbol of the American film industry
No. of screens	40,393 (2017)[1]
• Per capita	14 per 100,000 (2017)[1]
Main distributors	Disney Walt Disney Pictures 20th Century Studios Sony Columbia Pictures TriStar Pictures Comcast Universal Pictures Paramount Global Paramount Pictures Warner Bros. Discovery Warner Bros. Pictures New Line Cinema Amazon MGM
Produced feature films (2016)[2]
Fictional	646 (98.5%)
Animated	10 (1.5%)
Number of admissions (2017)[4]
Total	1,239,742,550
• Per capita	3.9 (2010)[3]
Gross box office (2017)[4]
Total	$11.1 billion

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The cinema of the United States, centered around major film studios collectively referred to as Hollywood, has significantly influenced the global film industry since the early 20th century.

Classical Hollywood cinema, a filmmaking style developed in the 1910s, continues to shape many American films today. While French filmmakers Auguste and Louis Lumière are often credited with modern cinema's origins,^[5] American filmmaking quickly rose to global dominance. As of 2017, more than 600 English-language films released annually in the U.S., making it the fourth-largest producer of films, trailing only India, Japan, and China.^[6] Although the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand also produce English-language films, they are not directly part of the Hollywood system. Due to this global reach, Hollywood is often considered a transnational cinema,^[7] with some films released in multiple language versions, such as Spanish and French.

Contemporary Hollywood frequently outsources production to countries including the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. The five major film studios--Universal Pictures, Paramount Pictures, Warner Bros., Walt Disney Studios, and Sony Pictures--are media conglomerates that dominate U.S. box office revenue and have produced some of the most commercially successful film and television programs worldwide.^[8][9]

Hollywood is widely regarded as the oldest hub of the film industry, with the earliest studios and production companies emerging there. It has served as the birthplace of numerous cinematic genres,^[10] including comedy, drama, action, musical, romance, horror, science fiction, and mystery.

The success of Hollywood started after the creation of the Motion Picture. In 1878, photographer Eadweard Muybridge decided to experiment with a series of "moving" pictures. At the time he was a notable player to other contemporaries of the 19th century and known for capturing views of National Treasure's such as Yosemite National Park, the skyline of San Francisco, lighthouses on the West Coast, and the newly acquired Alaskan Territory among others. He used banks of twelve custom-made cameras to photograph professors, athletes, students, patients and local residents, all in motion. He unveiled this series during a lecture at the Royal Institution in London, where he displayed his photographs on screen and showed moving pictures projected by his 'zoopraxiscope'.

In 1894 the world's first commercial motion-picture exhibition was held in New York City using Thomas Edison's kinetoscope,^[11] and kinetograph.^[12] In the following decades, the production of silent films greatly expanded, new studios formed, and migrated to California, and the films and stories they told became much longer. The United States produced the world's first sync-sound musical film, The Jazz Singer in 1927,^[13] and was at the forefront of sound-film development in the following decades. It was fully released to the public on October 6, 1927.

Since the early 20th century, the U.S. film industry has primarily been based in and around the thirty-mile zone, centred in the Hollywood neighbourhood of Los Angeles County, California. The director D. W. Griffith was central to the development of a film grammar. Orson Welles's Citizen Kane (1941) is frequently cited in critics' polls as the greatest film of all time.^[14]