Film titles made their appearance in the earliest silent films, along with letter cards (or inter-titles), which provided context. Here is the main title from D.W. Griffith’s “Intolerance” (1916), which many reviewers and historians consider the greatest film of the silent era.
Opening credits since the early 1980s, if present at all, identify the major actors and crew, while the closing credits list an extensive cast and production crew. Historically, opening credits have been the only source of crew credits and the cast, although over time the their was a tendency to repeat the cast, and perhaps add a few players, with their roles identified (as was not always the case in the opening credits), evolved.
The ascendancy of television movies after 1964 and the increasingly short "shelf-life" of films in theatres has greatly contributed to the credits convention which came with television programs from the beginning, of holding the vast majority of cast and crew information for display at the end of the show.
Films would only use basic titles and up until television came around and dominated the visual scene, cinemas started to step up and upgrade from picture titles to actual visuals.
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