Other Eastern cities, most notably Chicago and Cleveland, also served as early centers for film production. Chelsea, Manhattan, was also frequently used. The Edison Studios were located in the Bronx. In New York, the Kaufman Astoria Studios in Queens, which was built during the silent film era, was used by the Marx Brothers and W.C. Such notables as Mary Pickford got their start at Biograph Studios. In the 1910s and 1920s, film companies such as the Independent Moving Pictures Company, Peerless Studios, The Solax Company, Éclair Studios, Goldwyn Picture Corporation, American Méliès (Star Films), World Film Company, Biograph Studios, Fox Film Corporation, Pathé Frères, Metro Pictures Corporation, Victor Film Company, and Selznick Pictures Corporation were all making pictures in Fort Lee. Others quickly followed and either built new studios or leased facilities in Fort Lee. In 1909, a forerunner of Universal Studios, the Champion Film Company, built the first studio. In 1907, when the Kalem Company began using Fort Lee as a location for filming in the area, other filmmakers quickly followed. The industry began attracting both capital and an innovative workforce. The cities and towns on the Hudson River and Hudson Palisades offered land at costs considerably less than New York City across the river and benefited greatly as a result of the phenomenal growth of the film industry at the turn of the 20th century.

The industry got its start at the end of the 19th century with the construction of Thomas Edison's ' Black Maria', the first motion-picture studio in West Orange, New Jersey. The history of cinema in the United States can trace its roots to the East Coast where, at one time, Fort Lee, New Jersey, was the motion-picture capital of America. Harold Lloyd in the clock scene from Safety Last! (1923) Into the 21st century, 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 and a leading pioneer in motion picture engineering and technology. Moreover, many of Hollywood's highest-grossing movies have generated more box-office revenue and ticket sales outside the United States than films made elsewhere. The major film studios of Hollywood are the primary source of the most commercially successful and most ticket selling movies in the world.

Orson Welles's Citizen Kane (1941) is frequently cited in critics' polls as the greatest film of all time. Griffith was central to the development of a film grammar. film industry has largely been based in and around the thirty-mile zone in Hollywood, Los Angeles, California. The United States produced the world's first sync-sound musical film, The Jazz Singer, in 1927, and was at the forefront of sound-film development in the following decades. In the following decades, production of silent film greatly expanded, studios formed and migrated to California, and films and the stories they told became much longer. In 1894, the world's first commercial motion-picture exhibition was given in New York City, using Thomas Edison's kinetoscope. In 1878, Eadweard Muybridge demonstrated the power of photography to capture motion. It is also the birthplace of various genres of cinema-among them comedy, drama, action, the musical, romance, horror, science fiction, and the war epic-and has set the example for other national film industries. Hollywood is considered to be the oldest film industry, in the sense of being the place where the earliest film studios and production companies emerged. Contemporary Hollywood often outsources production to Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. That said, Hollywood has also been considered a transnational cinema, and has produced multiple language versions of some titles, often in Spanish or French. While the national cinemas of the United Kingdom (299), Canada (206), Australia, and New Zealand also produce films in the same language, they are not considered part of the Hollywood system. As of 2017, it produced the second-largest number of films of any single-language national cinema, after China, with more than 700 English-language films released on average every year. While Frenchmen Auguste and Louis Lumière are generally credited with the birth of modern cinema, American cinema soon came to be a dominant force in the emerging industry.

The dominant style of American cinema is classical Hollywood cinema, which developed from 1913 to 1969 and is still typical of most films made there to this day. The cinema of the United States, also known as Hollywood, has had a large effect on the global film industry since the early 20th century.

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