During the 1920s and 1930s, action-based films were often "swashbuckling" adventure films in which Douglas Fairbanks or Errol Flynn wielded swords in period pieces. The long-running success of the James Bond series of spy films in the 1960s and 1970s helped to popularise the modern day action film. The early Bond films were characterised by quick cutting, car chases, fist fights and ever more elaborate action sequences. The series also established the concept of the resourceful hero, who is able to dispatch the villains with a ready one-liner. Early American action films usually focused on maverick police officers, as in Bullitt (1968), The French Connection (1971) and Dirty Harry (1971). These were among the earliest films to present a car chase as an action set-piece. Dirty Harry (1971) can be considered "the action film's first true archetype."^[1]:23 The genre came about as a synthesis of the existing western and film noir genres, with some elements of the police procedural.^[1]:3-4

However, the action film did not become a dominant form in Hollywood until the 1980s, when it was popularized by actors such as Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bruce Willis and Mel Gibson. The 1988 film Die Hard was particularly influential on the development of the genre in the following decade. In the film, Bruce Willis plays a New York police detective who inadvertently becomes embroiled in a terrorist take-over of a Los Angeles office block. The film set a pattern for a host of imitators, like Under Siege (1992) or Air Force One (1997), which used the same formula in a different setting. Action films tend to be expensive when requiring big budget special effects and stunt work. As such, they are regarded as mostly a Hollywood genre, although there have been a significant number of action films from Hong Kong which are primarily modern variations of the martial arts film. Because of these roots, Hong Kong action films typically center on acrobatics by the protagonist while American action films typically feature big explosions, car chases, stunt work and (more recently) CGI special effects technology.

Most recently, thanks to the better availability of CGI technology at a lower price, action cinema outside of Hollywood has been able to provide viewers with the same degree of spectacle as was once only available from big budget American action films, and in fact, many American filmmakers will outsource CGI special effects work to Asian companies in order to decrease the overall production cost.