Throughout the 20th century, cinema has played, and, to some extent, continues to play a key role in shaping the social imagination and anthropology of modern human. Nevertheless, as a review of English scholarly literature shows, cinema, unlike art and music, remains a marginal subject of analysis for sociologists. The article attempts to consider the state of sociological reflection on cinema in the context of the cultural turn in sociology in both the international and national contexts. By reconstructing the history of the interaction between sociology, film studies, and cultural studies, the author not only proves the scar-city of interest among sociologists in the analysis of cinema, but also discusses the ways by which socio-logical perspectives were involved in film research at the turn of the 20th–21st centuries, and the potential of the latter for the study of social imagination. A survey of communities of Soviet sci-fi cinema fans demonstrates one possible way of developing of the sociologically oriented program of cinema studies.