The right answer is: Movies became the nation’s chief form of mass entertainment. In 1896, a New York audience viewed the first moving-picture show. By 1908, there were nearly ten thousand movie theaters scattered across the nation; by 1924, there were twenty thousand theaters showing seven hundred new films a year. By the mid-1930s, every city and most small towns had movie theaters. Movie attendance during the 1920s averaged 80 million people a week. Americans spent ten times as much on movies as they did on tickets to baseball and football games