The worldwide theatrical market had a box office of US$42.2 billion in 2019. The top three continents/regions by box-office gross were Indo-Pacific with US$17.8 billion, the U.S. and Canada with US$11.4 billion, and Europe, the Middle East and North Africa with US$10.3 billion. As of 2019, the largest markets by box office were, in decreasing order, the United States, China, Japan, South Korea, the United Kingdom, France, and India.[1] As of 2019, the countries with the largest number of film productions were India, and the United States. In Europe, significant centres of movie production are France, Germany, Spain, Italy, and the United Kingdom.
China
Old Chinese Cinema in Qufu, Shandong
The cinema of China is one of three distinct historical threads of Chinese-language cinema together with the cinema of Hong Kong and the cinema of Taiwan. Cinema was introduced in China in 1896 and the first Chinese film, Dingjun Mountain, was made in 1905, with the film industry being centered on Shanghai in the first decades. China is the home of one of the largest film studios in the world, the Hengdian World Studios, and in 2010 it had the third largest film industry by number of feature films produced annually. For the next decade, the production companies were mainly foreign-owned, and the domestic film industry was centered on Shanghai, a thriving entrepot and the largest city in the Far East. In 1913, the first independent Chinese screenplay, The Difficult Couple, was filmed in Shanghai by Zheng Zhengqiu and Zhang Shichuan.
