One hundred years ago the first Hollywood feature film, The Squaw Man, opened in theaters across the country. Filmed in a Los Angeles barn and nearby locations, The Squaw Man’s fantastic success (it was remade twice, first in 1918 and later with sound in 1931) gave birth to copycat productions that eventually turned Tinseltown into the modern film mecca it’s become.
A century later, Hollywood’s highest grossing films have budgets more than 10 times as much as The Squaw Man‘s entire gross. In honor of that film’s precedent-setting TIME has scoured the movie vaults and found the highest grossing films from each year of the past century and packed them into five and a half minutes. From silent films to musicals, Best Picture winners to summer superhero mega-hits, these films opened moviegoers’ hearts (and wallets!) for the past 100 years.
Gross figures from: the-numbers.com; boxofficemojo.com; filmsite.org