"fWhen "movies" first began""...... I am tired of hearing it. Can we please stop patronising the past. In 1894 they filmed novelty acts just as they would continue to do throughout the decade and beyond. The genre became particularly common iafter the inroduction of the newreel and the "magazine" (c. 1909) and the highpoint for this kind of spectacle in the cinema probably occurrs in the twenties and thirties when such material filled the newreels shown certainly with other films but also shown in the many specialist newsreel cinemas which continued to exist until the advent of television. After which such novelty items continued to be filmed in just the same way for the small screen and they are today to be found all over the internet. There has been no very noticeable change in the nature of such films at any time.
This is not a every wonderful film. Edison films are extremely poor both with respect to quality and content compared with the work, just a few years later, of the Lumière operators in France which effectively pushed Edison and the rival Mutoscope company both to abandon peephole exhibition and to broaden and improve the content and quality of their films. But novelty acts involving acrobats, magicians, trained animals and so on remained part of the repertoire of all film companies until the 1910s when they began to be included in the newsreels and film magazines where they would remain until the advent of television. All that changes is the way the repertoire is organised and then the particular medium that transmits them. To confirm this fact, jsut do a google search for "boxing cats"....