ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses the structure of Hollywood film distribution through the lens of risk. It analyses how the pace and direction of social creativity has a bearing on major filmed entertainment’s degree of confidence, which refers to the ability of capitalists to make predictions about future earnings. The chapter also examines how major filmed entertainment strategically calibrates its effect on the social creativity of cinema – how it controls the pace and direction of film-making but without suffocating it completely. When some aesthetic qualities of cinema are perceived as riskier investments than others, Hollywood has a financial interest to be strategic about which expressions of human creativity it will affirm and which expressions it will mould, shape, modify or even reject. Aesthetic overproduction is itself a consequence of how the business accounts of art “are kept in terms of the money unit, not in terms of livelihood, nor in terms of the serviceability of the goods.
