History of action movies

Today Im doing a research about the history of action films.

Early action films

Historians consider The Great Train Robbery to be the first action film. 
During the 1920s and 1930s, action films were often based in adventure films such as westerns.
The 1940s and 1950s saw "action" in a new form through war and cowboy movies.
The long-running success of the James Bond films or series (which dominated the action films of the 1960s) introduced a staple of the modern-day action film: the resourceful hero. Such larger-than-life characters were a veritable “one-man army”; able to dispatch villainous masterminds after cutting through their disposable henchmen in increasingly creative ways.
The Bond films also used fast cutting, car chases, fist fights, a variety of weapons and gadgets, and elaborate action sequences.

1970s

During the 1970s, gritty detective stories and urban crime dramas began to evolve and fuse themselves with the new "action" style, leading to a string of maverick police officer films, such as Bullitt (1968) and The French Connection (1971).
In the 1970s, martial-arts films from Hong Kong became popular with Western audiences and inspired big budget films such as Bruce Lee's Enter the Dragon (1973). Chuck Norris blended martial arts with 'cops and robbers' in films such as Good Guys Wear Black (1977).
From Japan, Sonny Chiba starred in his first martial arts movie in 1973 called the Karate Kiba. His breakthrough international hit was The Street Fighter series (1974), which established him as the reigning Japanese martial arts actor in international cinema. 


1980s

In the 1980s Hollywood produced many big budget action blockbusters with actors such as Sylvester stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Lorenzo Lamas and Bruce Willis.
That same year, Sylvester Stallone starred in First Blood, the first installment in the Rambo film series which made the character John Rambo a pop culture icon.
1984 saw the beginning of the Terminator starring Linda Hamilton and Arnold Schwarzenegger.
1987's Lethal Weapon starring Mel Gibson, Danny Glover and Darlene Love was another significant action film hit of the decade, and another "buddy-cop" genre classic, launching a franchise that spawned 3 sequels.
The 1988 film, Die Hard, was particularly influential on the development of the action genre. 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 building high-rise. The use of a maverick, resourceful lone hero has always been a common thread from James Bond to John Rambo, but John McClane in Die Hard is much more of an 'everyday' person whom circumstance turns into a reluctant hero.
By the end of the 1980s, the influence of the successful action film could be felt in almost every genre.


1990s

Like the Western genre, spy-movies, as well as urban-action films, were starting to parody themselves, and with the growing revolution in CGI (computer generated imagery), the "real-world" settings began to give way to increasingly fantastic environments. This new era of action films often had budgets unlike any in the history of motion pictures.The success of the many Dirty Harry and James Bond sequels had proven that a single successful action film could lead to a continuing action franchise. Thus, the 1980s and 1990s saw a rise in both budgets and the number of sequels a film could generally have. This led to an increasing number of filmmakers to create new technologies that would allow them to beat the competition and take audiences to new heights. The success of Tim Burton's Batman (1989) led to a string of financially successful sequels. Within a single decade, they proved the viability of a novel subgenre of action film: the comic-book movie.

2000s

While action films continued to flourish as the medium-budget genre movie, it also fused with tent-pole pictures in other genres. For example, 2009's Star trek had several science fiction tropes and concepts like time travel through a black hole. 
While the original Star Wars featured some of this kind of fighting, there was just as much emphasis on star-ship chases and dog fights in outer space. The newer films featured more light-saber duels, sometimes more intense and acrobatic than the originals. Some fan films also have similar duel scenes like those the prequel trilogy.
The trend with films such as The Matrix and The Dark Knight series, is that hand-to-hand fighting and Asian martial-arts techniques are now widely used in science fiction and superhero movies.
In The Fast and the Furious series the action film staple of the car chase is the central plot driver as it had been in Smokey and the Bandit films in the 1970s.

2010s

The cross-over of action with science fiction and superhero films continues with many Marvel Comics characters and settings being used for big budget films.