The enthusiasm that greeted story films in the early 1900s led many studios to shift decisively towards this type of film in meeting popular demand. The five main American production companies – Edison, Biograph, Lubin, Selig and Vitagraph – all moved into fiction filmmaking, as did the major film studios of Europe. From 1905 to 1906, this included the French studios Pathé and Gaumont, the Danish production company Nordisk, as well as the principal film companies of Britain and Italy such as Hepworth and Cines.

If cinema began to flourish in the 1900s, creating a soaring demand for new product, it was linked significantly to the rise of film exchanges. These first emerged in 1903 and had a profound effect on distribution and exhibition practices. Film exchanges enabled film producers to rent rather than sell their films. This had revolutionary implications. On the one hand, film exchanges helped to standardise film and turn it into an interchangeable commodity. On the other hand, they helped decouple the industrial arms of distribution and exhibition. These features would soon become central elements in the organisational structure of the wider film industry. Chicago became the largest centre of film exchanges in the mid-1900s, fifteen of the city's exchanges controlling 80 per cent of the rental business in the United States. These provided new prints to those exhibitors willing to pay a weekly premium.