Hollywood film industry

Cinema of the United States
No. of screens	40,547 (2015)
• Per capita	14.5 per 100,000 (2011)
Main distributors	Paramount (19.2%) Warner Bros. (18.0%) Sony Pictures (12.5%)
Produced feature films (2011)
Fictional	798 (97.4%)
Animated	21 (2.6%)
Number of admissions (2011)
Total	1,283,844,500
• Per capita	3.9 (2010)
Gross box office (2011)
Total	$10.2 billion

The cinema of the United States, often metonymously referred to as Hollywood, has had a profound effect on cinema across the world since the early 20th century. The dominant style of American cinema is Classical Hollywood Cinema, which developed from 1917-1960 and characterizes most films to this day. 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 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.

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