Throughout its history, the movie camera has been used for pornography, but for most of that time pornographic movies were typically available only by underground distribution, for projection at home or in private clubs and also night cinemas. Only in the 1970s were pornographic films semi-legitimized; by the 1980s, pornography on home video achieved distribution unimagined only decades earlier. The rise of the Internet in the late 1990s and early 2000s similarly changed distribution of pornography, and furthermore complicated legal prosecution of obscenity.

Pornography is a thriving, financially profitable business: according to a 2004 Reuters article, "The multi-billion-dollar industry releases about 11,000 titles on DVD each year, giving it tremendous power to sway the battle between two groups of studios and technology companies competing to set standards for the next generation".

Early examples

Pornographic motion pictures are nearly as old as the medium itself. According to Patrick Robertson's Film Facts, "the earliest pornographic motion picture which can definitely be dated is A L'Ecu d'Or ou la bonne auberge, made in France in 1908; the plot depicts a weary soldier who has a tryst with an inn's servant girl. Robertson notes that the Argentine pornographic film El Satario might be even older; it has been dated to somewhere between 1907 and 1912. Robertson notes that "the oldest surviving pornographic films are contained in America's Kinsey Collection." One film demonstrates how early pornographic conventions were established. The German film Am Abend (c. 1910) is, as Robertson writes, "a ten-minute film which begins with a woman masturbating alone in her bedroom, and progresses to scenes of her with a man performing sex, fellatio and anal penetration." (Robertson, p. 66)

Pornographic movies were widespread in the silent movie era of the 1920s, and were often shown in brothels. Many pornographic films were made in subsequent decades, but because of the clandestine nature of the filming and distribution, details of such "stag films" are often difficult to obtain. It is probably reasonable to assume that many sexually explicit films made before about 1950 are now permanently lost.

1960s and 1970s: Changing laws, changing attitudes

In the 1960s, some attitudes towards the depiction of sexuality began to change. European movies like I Am Curious (Yellow) (1969) and Language of Love (1969) were sexually explicit, but were framed as a quasi-documentaries, which made their legal status uncertain.

In 1969, Denmark became the first country to legalize hardcore pornography, and soon started producing theatrical feature film sex comedies such as Bordellet (1972) and I Jomfruens tegn (1973), starring mainstream actors and usually not thought of as "porno films" though including hardcore pornographic scenes.