The year 1939 in motion pictures is widely considered the most outstanding one ever, when it comes to the high quality and high attendance at the large set of the best films that premiered in the year (considered as a percentage of the population in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom at that time).

Motion picture historians and film often rate 1939 as "the greatest year in the history of Hollywood." Hollywood movies produced in Southern California were at the height of their Golden Age (in spite of many cheaply-made or indistinguished films also being produced, something one expects with any year in commercial cinema), and during 1939 there were the premieres of an outstandingly large number of exceptional motion pictures, many of which have been honored as all-time classic films.

1939 was one of the years in which the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences nominated ten films for Best Picture:

These films came from a wide variety of film genres and sources for their stories and settings, including these: Historical novels (Gone with the Wind), contemporary affairs (Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and Of Mice and Men), love stories, classic novels (Wuthering Heights), a fantasy-musical (The Wizard of Oz), a tragedy (Dark Victory), a story of the Old West (Stagecoach), and a comedy (Ninotchka).