Why don't people show more creativity?

I assume people are always creative, but they seem to be lacking.  Perhaps I should move to Japan, where people are more creative.

Japan produces a lot of entertainment for its own culture, from movies, books, cartoons, comics, music, but they represent Japanese culture, Japanese thoughts and ideas, and are made by Japanese people for a Japanese audience. Despite how much of their entertainment gets exported, a lot of it stays within the country to be enjoyed by its own people.

I used to think entertainment in the US was done this way. Someone has an idea, they create something, and it gets presented back to the people. If someone has a unique American perspective then they can make anything and get it published to show their own view of American culture.

I wanted to write novels, screenplays, comicbooks, cartoons, and this being the land of opportunity, with freedom of expression, I expected creative works to be accepted on the merit of their creativity. Instead I found roadblocks in each industry, all with the same last names. The gatekeepers expect you to be part of their club before you can submit your work, and you can't submit it unless you're part of their club. Try submitting a novel that doesn't conform to what the publisher expects, and since everything gets filtered through an agent first, you'll be rejected for not fitting their conventions. Try creating an animated work that doesn't fit the accepted conventions of cartoons as simpleminded entertainment, and you'll be rejected by TV networks and movie producers. Try sending the script for your movie in contrast to the dreck that gets accepted and sent to the masses, and guess what happens. Comics would be a great medium of expression, but guess who commands the industry.

Now the most obvious way to get around this is to go one step above and create the company that will publish your work. That would be fine except you need capital or a loan, and most banks expect you to be paying a mortgage as collateral. Even if you do get funding, you don't have the massive advertising and distribution network that the major companies have, so there's a good chance your work will go unnoticed.

The Internet seems like a great way to sidestep all of this, because you can create any media you want for any audience. But guess what, you still need funding, and most Internet content from independent creators do not have the budget to make anything on the level of the major companies who ensure their works stay mainstream.

There's so much griping about how our country's entertainment doesn't represent our own culture, but if you could make enough entertainment to compete, if you could represent our culture for our culture, then you can fight the creative monopoly and surpass it.

But who has a few hundred million to spare?