Movie industry of the United States

Cinema of the United States
The Hollywood Sign in Hollywood, Los Angeles, California, often regarded as a symbol of the American film industry.
No. of screens	40,547 (2015)
• Per capita	14 per 100,000 (2015)
Main distributors	Paramount (19.2%) Warner Bros. (18.0%) Sony Pictures (12.5%)
Produced feature films (2013)
Fictional	727 (98.5%)
Animated	11 (1.5%)
Number of admissions (2015)
Total	1,197,000,000
• Per capita	3.9 (2010)
Gross box office (2015)
Total	$10.1 billion

The cinema of the United States, often metonymously referred to as Hollywood, has had a profound effect on the film industry in general since the early 20th century. The dominant style of American cinema is classical Hollywood cinema, which developed from 1917 to 1960 and characterizes most films made there to this day. While Frenchmen Auguste and Louis Lumière are generally credited with the birth of modern cinema, American cinema quickly came to be the most dominant force in the industry as it emerged. Since the 1920s, the film industry of the United States has had higher annual grosses than any other country's. It produces the largest number of films of any single-language national cinema, with more than 800 English-language films released on average every year. While the national cinemas of the United Kingdom (299), Canada (206), and Australia and New Zealand also produce films in the same language, they are not considered part of the Hollywood system. Hollywood has also been considered a transnational cinema. Classical Hollywood produced multiple language versions of some titles, often in Spanish or French. Contemporary Hollywood offshores production to Canada, Australia, New Zealand.

Hollywood is the oldest film industry in the world, and is considered the birthplace of various genres of cinema—among them comedy, drama, action, the musical, romance, horror, science fiction and the war epic—having set an example for other national film industries. It produced the world’s first sound (talkie) as well as musical film The Jazz Singer.