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United Kingdom

The United Kingdom has had a significant film industry for over a century. While film production reached an all-time high in 1936, the "golden age" of British cinema is usually thought to have occurred in the 1940s, during which the directors David Lean, Michael Powell, (with Emeric Pressburger) and Carol Reed produced their most highly acclaimed work. Many British actors have achieved worldwide fame and critical success, such as Maggie Smith, Roger Moore, Michael Caine, Sean Connery, Daniel Day-Lewis, Gary Oldman, and Kate Winslet. Some of the films with the largest-ever box-office returns have been made in the United Kingdom, including the third- and fourth- highest-grossing film series (Harry Potter and James Bond).

The first moving picture was shot in Leeds by Louis Le Prince in 1888, and the first moving pictures developed on celluloid film were made in Hyde Park, London, in 1889 by British inventor William Friese Greene, who patented the process in 1890.

Two of the top eight- highest-grossing films worldwide of all time have some British historical, cultural or creative dimensions: Titanic (1997), Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2 (2011), The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003), and Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (2005). Adding four more Harry Potter films and one more Lord of the Rings movie, plus the Tim Burton version of Alice in Wonderland (2010), and more than half of the top twenty most financially successful films had a substantial British dimension.

British influence can also be seen with the 'English Cycle' of Disney animated films, which include Alice in Wonderland (1951), Peter Pan (1953), One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1961), The Sword in the Stone (1963), and The Jungle Book (1967). Disney first became interested in live-action films as a means of using financial reserves which had built up in Britain, and could not be repatriated owing to exchange controls, by making two films from Scottish and English sources. These were Treasure Island (1950) and The Story of Robin Hood and His Merrie Men (1952), which were both successes at the box office. The studio continued to draw on British source material for its animated films after Walt Disney 's death in 1967, with the cartoon feature films Robin Hood (1973), The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh and The Rescuers (both 1977), one of many Disney to draw on A. A. Milne 's characters.

In the 1970s and 1980s, British studios established a reputation for great special effects in films such as Superman (1978), Alien (1979), and Batman (1989). Some of this reputation was founded on the core of talent brought together for the filming of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) who subsequently worked together on series and feature films for Gerry Anderson. The Bristol-based Aardman Animations is known for its stop-motion animation.

In late 1998, Channel 4 launched their free-to-air film channel Film4 – a channel specifically designed to show films. It broadcasts from 11:00am BST and competes with pay television film network Sky Cinema.

The London-based visual effects company Framestore, with Tim Webber the visual effects supervisor, have worked on the films The Dark Knight (2008) and Gravity (2013), with new techniques involved in Gravity taking three years to complete.