In 2009, the UK Film Council commissioned the first of two studies intended to go beyond conventional film industry research, to explore more fundamentally what film “means” to the population at large. The first of these called for an attempt to define and measure the “cultural impact” of film; and this was followed two years later by an inquiry into the “contribution” that film makes to the culture of the United Kingdom. An important feature of both studies was that they began from a recognition of film's ubiquity in the 21st century, with viewings now taking place on many platforms, and with these same electronic media also supporting a major new sphere of discourse about film.

The history of trying to assess the impact of film on whole populations is, as earlier contributions to this book have shown, almost as old as the medium itself. In Britain, as early as 1917, the (self-appointed) National Council of Public Morals undertook a study of The Cinema; Its Present Position and Future Potential, while another report in 1936 dealt with the significance of national production in a Hollywood- dominated world. Even earlier, widespread concern that films were having a negative effect on the young and on public “morals” led to the creation of the industry-organized British Board of Film Censors 1912, and to similar initiatives in many European countries. In 1922, after more than a decade of chaotic local censorship, the Hollywood studios established the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, which advocated industry self-censorship to forestall state intervention. Concern with “negative effects” has continued to drive both academic research in the 1930s and 1940s, and state intervention prompted by development of new media (as with the 1984 Video Recordings Act in Britain, responding to a moral panic over “video nasties”). However, this has also been balanced by the growing involvement of market researchers in advising on film promotion and reaching target audiences for cinema advertising and confectionary sales.

What was significantly different about the UKFC studies was that both took a broad, non-instrumental view of the place of film: the first by tracing “cultural impact” beyond the initial cinema release of films, and the second by comparing responses to film with a wide range of other cultural and leisure activities, and sampling responses to self-selected films.