Creativity in context

This chapter describes theoretical literatures with empirical literature on the film industry, in order to analyze creativity at the industry level. It provides an analytical framework that may be used for understanding different models of filmmaking in future comparative work on the film industry, but also serves as inspiration for other work on cultural industries. The chapter presents the film industry, and outlines how different film clusters of the world perform very differently in economic terms. It introduces the problems of organization and of creativity in context, in order to understand these persistent performance differences of the film industry. The chapter explores the first part of the analysis of what drives organization in the film industry: the balancing of creativity by concerns of cost. It discusses how creativity is also balanced by concerns of compensating for chance elements in the demand for films and analyses the balance of creativity by concerns of collection.