Martial arts films are a subgenre of action films that feature martial arts combat between characters. These combats are usually the films' primary appeal and entertainment value, and often are a method of storytelling and character expression and development. Martial arts are frequently featured in training scenes and other sequences in addition to fights. Martial arts films commonly include hand-to-hand combat along with other types of action, such as stuntwork, chases, and gunfights. Sub-genres of martial arts films include kung fu films, wuxia, karate films, and martial arts action comedy films, while related genres include gun fu, jidaigeki and samurai films.

Notable actors who have contributed to the genre include Bruce Lee, Jet Li, Jackie Chan, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Tony Jaa, Sammo Hung, Chuck Norris, Toshiro Mifune, Donnie Yen, Gordon Liu, Robin Shou, and Wesley Snipes, among others. Women have also played key roles in the genre, including such actresses as Cheng Pei-pei, Michelle Yeoh, Angela Mao, Zhang Ziyi, Josephine Siao, Cynthia Rothrock, and Kuo Hsiao-Chuang.

The first ever martial arts film was a Chinese film released in 1928, The Burning of the Red Lotus Temple (also translated as "The Burning of the Red Lotus Monastery"), a silent film directed by Chinese film director Zhang Shichuan and produced by the Mingxing Film Company. The film pioneered the martial arts film genre, and was the first kung fu action film ever created. The film is based on the popular Chinese novel "The Romance of the Red Lotus Temple", which is set in the Qing Dynasty and tells the story of a group of martial artists who band together to defend their temple from raiders. The film is notable for its action sequences and fight scenes, which were groundbreaking for the time and helped establish the martial arts film genre.

Beginning in 1950 with Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon, starring Toshiro Mifune, Japanese cinema produced a number of samurai films. These films influenced the subsequent Hong Kong kung fu films of Bruce Lee.

Asian films are known to have a more minimalist approach to film based on their culture. Some martial arts films have only a minimal plot and amount of character development and focus almost exclusively on the action, while others have more creative and complex plots and characters along with action scenes. Films of the latter type are generally considered to be artistically superior films, but many films of the former type are commercially successful and well received by fans of the genre. One of the earliest Hollywood movies to employ the use of martial arts was the 1955 film Bad Day at Black Rock, though the scenes of Spencer Tracy performed barely any realistic fight sequences, but composed mostly of soft knifehand strikes.

Martial arts films contain many characters who are martial artists and these roles are often played by actors who are real martial artists. If not, actors frequently train in preparation for their roles or the action director may rely more on stylized action or film making tricks like camera angles, editing, doubles, undercranking, wire work and computer-generated imagery. Trampolines and springboards used to be used to increase the height of jumps. The minimalist style employs smaller sets and little space for improvised but explosive fight scenes, as seen by Jackie Chan's films. These techniques are sometimes used by real martial artists as well, depending on the style of action in the film.

According to The New York Times, in the 1960s Jimmy Wang Yu was "the biggest star of Asian martial arts cinema until the emergence of Bruce Lee."

During the 1970s and 1980s, the most visible presence of martial arts films was the hundreds of English-dubbed kung fu and ninja films produced by the Shaw Brothers, Godfrey Ho and other Hong Kong producers. These films were widely broadcast on North American television on weekend timeslots that were often colloquially known as Kung Fu Theater, Black Belt Theater or variations thereof. Inclusive in this list of films are commercial classics like The Big Boss (1971), Drunken Master (1978) and One Armed Boxer (1972). Those films had a large impact on the spread of practice of traditional Chinese and Japanese martial arts in English-speaking countries.