Parisians tend to share the same movie-going trends as many of the world's global cities, that is to say with a dominance of Hollywood-generated film entertainment.
French cinema comes a close second, with major directors (réalisateurs) such as Claude Lelouch, François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol and Luc Besson, and the more slapstick/popular genre with director Claude Zidi as an example.
European and Asian films are also widely shown and appreciated. A specialty of Paris is its very large network of small movie theatres: on a given week the movie fan has the choice between around 300 old or new movies from all over the world.
Many of Paris's concert/dance halls were transformed into movie theatres when the media became popular from the 1930s.
Later most of the largest cinemas were divided into multiple, smaller rooms: Paris's largest cinema today is by far le Grand Rex theatre with 2,800 seats, while other cinemas all have fewer than 1,000 seats.
There is now a trend toward modern multiplexes that contain more than 10 or 20 screens.
