February 8: A Pivotal Date In Cinema History

For almost as long as movies have been made, February 8 has held a special significance in the history of cinema. In a sense, three of the historic events to have occurred on this date serve as cinematic landmarks, demarcating different epochs in the development of the motion picture industry.

February 2026 has some highly anticipated movie releases of its own, but none of them compare with the paradigm shifts represented by what happened on February 8 in the years 1915, 1926, and 1976. These three years between them have conferred unparalleled importance on this date in the film calendar.

111 Februaries ago, a movie was released that would revolutionize the art of cinema like never before. D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation has always been highly controversial for its sympathetic portrayal of white supremacists in the United States, but as a work of art, the film remains a colossal cinematic achievement.

Meanwhile, 11 years later, the studio responsible for Disney’s first animated films was officially launched on February 8. It was exactly 100 years ago that Walt Disney Studios came into existence. Half a century later, the release of Martin Scorsese’s greatest masterpiece, Taxi Driver, took New Hollywood by storm.

February 8 Is A Date With Over A Century Of Movie History Behind It

There aren’t many – if any – dates in the calendar as important to movie history as February 8. Although February has become a popular month of the year for theatrical releases, as February 2026 demonstrates, it’s still far from the most popular, and there’s no good reason why the eighth day of this month should hold any particular significance for film.

It just so happens, though, that three events which would come to shape cinema as we know it occurred on February 8, albeit spread across a span of 61 years. These events are fundamental to the history of long-form cinema, motion-picture animation, and modern character studies on the big screen.

In fact, the movie that laid the blueprint for the feature film as an art form, the studio primarily responsible for cinematic cartoon animation, and the masterpiece that defines New Hollywood auteur filmmaking more than any other, are all inextricably tied to this date. For film history buffs, February 8 is cause for a triple commemoration.

D.W. Griffith’s The Birth Of A Nation Was Released On February 8, 1915

Apart from being one of the best movies over 100 years old in its own right, The Birth of a Nation looms large over the entire cinema industry, as a release of towering significance. The first truly great work of long-form motion-picture storytelling with a singular narrative, the movie’s influence on the development of film as an artistic form can’t be overstated.

The Birth of a Nation’s technical achievements are beyond doubt, and no one can deny the central role it played in the development of early Hollywood cinema. Nevertheless, it’s also impossible to defend the outwardly racist depiction of American race relations in the film’s account of the Civil War and Reconstruction eras, including the glorification of the KKK.

The movie’s co-writer and director, D. W. Griffith, was the son of a Confederate Army officer, and openly espoused white-supremacist views. He based his script on a novel entitled The Clansman by Thomas Dixon Jr., whose father and uncle were themselves members of the Ku Klux Klan.

Despite being controversial from the moment of its release, The Birth of a Nation was enormously popular. Its success owed a considerable amount to formal technological advances on previous works of cinema, as well as D.W. Griffith’s promotional roadshow around the United States.

The movie’s theatrical run began on February 8 at Clune's Auditorium in Los Angeles, and ended in January 1916. By that point, over 3 million people had seen it.

Walt Disney Studios Was Founded On February 8, 1926

Exactly 10 years after The Birth of a Nation’s first wide-release theatrical showing, Walt Disney and his brother Roy officially founded the Walt Disney Studio, at a recently acquired building on Hyperion Avenue, in the Franklin Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles. Prior to this moment, the Disney brothers had been using part of a realtor’s office as a makeshift studio.

100 years later, Disney’s filmmaking division is still going strong. It recently became the first studio of the 2020s to gross more than $6 billion in a calendar year. Its status as one of the film industry’s biggest players is founded on the work that took place at 2719 Hyperion Avenue between 1926 and 1940.

This was the place where Mickey Mouse was created, and where the early Disney cartoon series Silly Symphonies was animated, including the first ever full-color animated short Flowers and Trees. The crowning achievement of the Hyperion Avenue studio was Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Disney’s first animated feature film.

What’s more, most of the work on Disney’s next two feature-length classics, Pinocchio and Fantasia, also took place at this studio. The significance of this period, not only in the development of Walt Disney Studios, but in the history of animation and cinema at large, is beyond monumental.

New Hollywood Masterpiece Taxi Driver Premiered On February 8, 1976

50 years on from the official opening of the Walt Disney Studio, another landmark moment in cinema history took place on the opposite coast of the United States. Martin Scorsese’s film Taxi Driver opened on February 8, 1976 at New York’s Coronet Theater.

It represented the high-water mark of New Hollywood, the age when American cinema belonged to pioneering auteur filmmakers. As a singular portrait authentically immersed in the streets of its setting and the disturbed mind of its central subject, this masterpiece encapsulates the cinematic epoch to which it belongs better than any other movie.

The Godfather and 2001: A Space Odyssey get more credit overall, but neither is as definitively symbolic of New Hollywood noir. Meanwhile, on Taxi Driver’s 50th anniversary, this is the Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro collaboration still speaking to new generations. Raging Bull and The Departed might have won them their Oscars, but Taxi Driver is what’s immortalized them.

Without These February 8 Events, Cinema Would Look Very Different

There are countless moments in cinematic history without which the landscape of this art form would look very different. But among them, the three we remember on February 8 all stand out.

The Birth of a Nation and Taxi Driver are two of the movies most commonly taught in film schools, as works that fundamentally changed the course of their industry. What’s more, the opening of Walt Disney’s first fully-fledged animation studio was arguably the single most foundational moment in the development of animated motion pictures, at least in the United States.

By itself, a single date in the calendar signifies very little. These historic events could just as easily have occurred on any other day of the year. Yet, by sheer coincidence, February 8 connects three of the most important landmarks in the lengthy timeline of American filmmaking – which makes it a date worth talking about.