How many movies have been released in Hollywood history?
Since the early years of the 20th century, Hollywood has been the global centre for the greatest mass entertainment art form in history: the motion picture. While studios, cinematic trends, golden ages, and new eras may have come and gone, Tinsel Town has stayed put, growing in size and stature ever since filmmakers began moving to the West Coast of the United States in 1911.
Major studios have existed since the very beginning, churning out dozens of feature films a year to the tune of millions—if not billions—in box office earnings. In the early days of commercial filmmaking, the big players even ran their own cinemas, ensuring they could monopolise movie screenings. Yet there have always been independent filmmakers, too, and ever since the founding of United Artists in 1919, they have made a sizeable share of the films produced in Hollywood.
Independents now arguably occupy less of the market in terms of movie earnings than they ever have; however, many streaming platforms like to champion their role in promoting feature films outside of the “Big Five” studios. Yet, at the same time, there are more independent filmmakers than ever before, and many of them still get to make their pictures in Hollywood, or at least via Hollywood financing.
In this way, indie and arthouse studios contribute a large percentage of the total number of movies made each year despite operating on far smaller budgets than the majors. They helped take the total number of films by American and Canadian filmmakers released in cinemas to over 500 last year for the first time since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. Just 96 of these movies were produced by major studios.
But what’s the total number of Hollywood movies?
This total is still far smaller than Hollywood’s peak production rate in the 1920s and 1930s, when around 800 films were released per year. Unlike today, when the majority of small films aren’t even made with the backing of an independent studio, pretty much all Hollywood movies back then were produced through the same studio system.
According to the Los Angeles Times, the 800-film average included more than just Hollywood productions. 35 years ago, they reported that 1939 had been the greatest year ever for Hollywood movie releases, with 365 films out in cinemas taking $80million a week.
Perhaps we can estimate that, at the time, just under half of the cinematic works released in North America were Hollywood-produced. Now, the proportion is even less. And so, if we’re looking at the total number of films released in Hollywood history, we can estimate that, at most, they equate to half the number of movies ever released in the US and Canada at most.
The pandemic low of 333 movies going out in cinemas actually wasn’t much less than the 371 movies which were released at the turn of this century. We can assume, then, that the average number of films released per year in North America is far less than the 800 figure bandied about for Hollywood’s first golden age. It could even be less than the 504 movies released last year.
500 seems like a fairly sensible median figure for the overall annual average, however. And if we assume that 44% of these releases were from Hollywood in some way – splitting the difference between the 42% of last year’s studio releases and the 46% of releases that came from Hollywood in 1939 – we might get a decent estimate.
In that case, rounded to the nearest thousand, the total number of Hollywood movies ever released is approximately 25,000. Not bad going for what was a tiny village on the outskirts of Los Angeles 112 years ago.
