Japanese films are increasing in popularity again, not only at the Cannes Film Festival but also in the Japanese Market. At the box office, sales of Japanese films have regained over half their market share since 2006, overtaking Hollywood movies, which made up the major share of films from 1975 to 2005. Several major factors accounting for the current success of the Japanese film business are widely discussed (Tanaka, 2010; Yamashita and Yamada, 2010). First, major Japanese TV stations wanted to cut costs; avoiding buying expensive Hollywood films by demanding inexpensive Japanese films. Second, the growth of cinema complexes provides many more screens, increasing opportunities in Japanese markets for Japanese filmmakers. Third, many cultural critics suggest Japan’s younger generation shows a more domestically-orientated cultural outlook than previous generations, tending to prefer Japanese films to Hollywood films. However, finally, one of the main factors for this resurgence is the new business approach adopted and practiced within Japanese film production today, which shifted from independent film studios to joint ventures involving both media and non-media-related companies. This enabled films from these joint ventures to generate greater sales than in the era when film studios held a monopoly.
These filmmaking joint ventures are termed “Film Production Consortia” (FPC) or, in Japanese, “Eiga Seisaku Iinkai”. A typical FPC is a temporary organizational body for the joint venture project, led by a major TV broadcasting company, and consisting not only of film business companies, but also other media companies, non-media sponsor companies in manufacturing and service industries. In Japan, FPCs have dramatically increased the share of films in local markets and are providing the majority of current hit movies. Thus, for film production, FPCs are effective inter-firm alliances that jointly acquire resources (including financial resources) from member companies, while sharing business risks, coordinating internal deals involving the multi-use of content across media, manufacturing and service industries, and practicing intensive media-mix film promotion. FPCs are quite new to the Japanese film industry and have not been seen in the global film industry, especially Hollywood, where major TV broadcasting companies have tended not to take so many initiatives to organize joint interfirm film-making projects for box office movies. This paper attempts to demonstrate new advantages of FPCs in Japanese film, animation, TV drama and related industries, analyzing typical cases and growth of interfirm FPC networks. We will discuss that FPCs shows not only growth of Japanese unique business but also emergence of new revenue model in creative industries.