Abstract
Producing new works of fiction for film and television is notoriously categorized as risky business. As discussed by David Hesmondhalgh, all business is risky, but the cultural industries are particularly risky because they are centred on texts to be bought and sold to audiences that use these texts in highly volatile and unpredictable ways (Hesmondhalgh 2013, p. 27). Developing a new film or television product is a process marked by high sunk costs without any certainty as to whether there will be audience demand for this specific new variation. In the film industry, the term ‘nobody knows’ is thus accepted as a common truth. Professor of economics Richard Caves (2000) has even formulated the ‘nobody knows principle’ as a defining property of the film and media industries, since it is impossible to predict how the market will react to a certain product beforehand.
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© 2016 Eva Novrup Redvall
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Redvall, E.N. (2016). Film and Media Production as a Screen Idea System. In: McIntyre, P., Fulton, J., Paton, E. (eds) The Creative System in Action. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137509468_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137509468_11
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