In the late eighteenth century most consumers enjoyed their entertainment in an informal, haphazard and often non-commercial way. This entry also limits itself to the evolution of the Western film industry, because it has been and still is the largest film industry in the world, in revenue terms, although this may well change in the future. This entry cannot do justice to developments in each and every country, given the nature of an encyclopedia article. It will discuss just a few countries, mainly the U.S., Britain and France, and then exclusively to investigate the economic issues it addresses, not to give complete histories of the industries in those countries. This article will limit itself exclusively to the economic development of the industry. Despite this economic significance, despite its rapid emergence and growth, despite its pronounced effect on the everyday life of consumers, and despite its importance as an early case of the industrialization of services, the economic history of the film industry has hardly been examined. In the depression-struck U.S., film was the tenth most profitable industry, and in 1930s France it was the fastest-growing industry, followed by paper and electricity, while in Britain the number of cinema-tickets sold rose to almost one billion a year (Bakker 2001b). In Italy, today hardly significant in international entertainment, the film industry was the fourth-largest export industry before the First World War. From the 1910s onwards, each year billions of cinema-tickets were sold and consumers who did not regularly visit the cinema became a minority. As the first form of industrialized mass-entertainment, it was all-pervasive. Like other major innovations such as the automobile, electricity, chemicals and the airplane, cinema emerged in most Western countries at the same time. Gerben Bakker, University of Essex Introduction The Economic History of the International Film Industry
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