The power of Japanese film production consortia: the evolution of inter-firm alliance networks and the revival of the Japanese film industry

Abstract

After long-term downturn of sales of Japanese films and dominance of Hollywood films in the Japanese film market during 1960’s and 1980’s, Japanese film industry revived from the latter part of 1990’s with evolution of interfirm film production and distribution alliances. In Japanese film industry, many of successful box-office films are currently produced and distributed under inter firm alliances across industries, which are called as a “film production consortium. (FPC)” In many of these cases, several major television broadcasting companies tend to form film production consortia, organizing several major firms across media industries including a film distribution company, a publisher of an original text or comic, an ad agency, a talent agency and other supporting companies (i.e. a nation-wide retailer or a videogame company). This chapter attempts to describe origin, main functions, history, current conditions and implications of a production consortium, growth of interfirm alliance networks mainly within media industries and new roles of producers to drive it. It also tries to explain reasons of its evolution and analyzes facing problems. We will argue these topics in following four parts, referring typical cases and major statistical trends. First, film production consortia have formed interfirm film production networks and become valuable social capital for box-office film production, mainly providing original texts and comics, funding money, excellent talents, new moving picture technology, media-mix promotion and multi-use of characters and moving pictures across media for film production. Second, a film production consortium increased from the middle of 1990’s, formed by several major television broadcasting companies, showed outstanding box-office sale and developed new character business. Third, within these interfirm networks, producers learnt new alliance capabilities to sequentially organize different combinations of production consortium. Finally, we will discuss current conditions of film production consortium, arguing that it becomes popular routines and show some difficulties to produce novel film projects. However, in considering global managerial implications, a film production consortium may give new business opportunities of multi-use of films across industries.