Film-induced culture plays a vital role in the global advertisement system. It is an effective approach for the advertisement of regional values and soft power, and it is a good pathway for cultural output and value proposition (Yi et al., 2020). With the advance of economic development, consumers have broken the restrictions of basic needs spending (Sun et al., 2017, 2021; Du et al., 2020), and the needs for higher-level cultural consumption are becoming increasingly important (Wang et al., 2020a,b; Li et al., 2021). Film-induced culture is by no means limited to entertainment culture, and film-induced products are by no means limited to spiritual and cultural consumer goods (Chen, 2018). Film/television is also a mass media. Film-induced culture has an unprecedented impact on people’s ways of thinking, social cognition, behavioral habits, and values, showing unique cultural tension and becoming an important structure of people’s spiritual life (Misra, 2000; Janssen et al., 2008). Otherwise, as a fast-growing important new tourism trend, film-induced tourism creates connections between characters, places, stories, and tourists, and is inspired to immerse themselves in films to relive film-generated and film-driven emotions (Riley et al., 1998). Essentially, both film and tourism provide an opportunity to relive or experience, see and learn novelties through entertainment and fun (Teng, 2021). Film-induced tourism increases the overall economic effect of tourism industry and establishes the bonds of film and tourism industry. It provides not only pleasure and satisfaction for film-induced tourists, but also adequate and novel learning experience. The latest research trends are moving toward merging or collaborating two fields that already have similar goals.

The integration of film-induced culture spreads information through film-induced programs to “maximize” the effect of tourism cultural brands (Huang and Liu, 2018). The fundamental reason is that the penetration of film-induced culture has driven the transformation and upgrading of tourism consumption (Michael et al., 2020), which in turn makes film-induced culture a resource for tourism development, amplifies the effect of cultural integration in the process of transformation, and further enhances the influence of the tourism industry (Marafa et al., 2020). The establishment of film-induced cities and film-induced bases creates the advantages of film-induced culture agglomeration, and the innovative path of developing film-induced cultural resources oriented by the tourism industry is becoming more and more popular (Ringle, 2018). Cultural resources are further optimized and reorganized, and film-induced culture will gain a series of new integrated development in the promotion of tourism industry model (Xin and Mossig, 2017). On the one hand, the film-induced bases can be used for film/television production, and on the other hand, it is an important place for tourism activities, which truly reflects the integration from products, markets, enterprises, and industries in film-induced tourism industry (Stuckey, 2021). Accordingly, some researchers believe that the establishment of Hollywood Studios in 1963 marked the official beginning of film-induced tourism. Hence, film-induced culture can promote the tourism industry to shape brand culture, integrate useful resources, guide consumer trends, and induce convergence effect for rapid development and innovation (Wu and Lai, 2021). Hence, the following hypotheses are proposed:

The integration of culture and tourism is not only the objective need for the mutual prosperity of culture and tourism, but also the inevitable trend of the development. The elements compete, cooperate and co-evolve with each other, so that an emerging industry can be formed, and it has experienced “grinding-integration-harmony” of the dynamic development process (Jovicic, 2016; Wang and Yi, 2020). Culture and tourism have a certain basis for mutual benefit and cooperation: for tourism, the integration of cultural-related content helps to acquire extensive knowledge, distant experience, and strong care; for culture, it is conducive to the protection and inheritance of cultural resources, image building, and propagation (Loulanski and Loulanski, 2011; Jørgensen and McKercher, 2019). The integration of culture and tourism is an intimate contact between “poems and dreams,” which better meets people’s diverse needs for a beautiful life (He et al., 2021). However, sustainable development refers to comprehensive and sustainable advancements in ecological, social, and economic aspects. The cognition that based on these three goals can be used to explore the dynamic mechanism for sustainable development of film-induced tourism.

In the dimension of sustainable ecological development, with the advent of the scientific revolution and the industrial revolution, the world is entering a new era. The utilization of resources is not limited to the development of physical resources but is more prone to the rational use of new resources, such as talented person, technology, intelligence, and data (Waheed et al., 2020; Zhang et al., 2020; Li et al., 2021), cultural resources, such as historical culture, red culture, and folk culture, are integrated with tourism resources, such as landscape pastoral, to develop complementary advantages. The maximization of resource utilization has become the key to the sustainable development of the film-induced tourism society, and culture has become a regulator of various innovation factors, which promotes the scientific management of technological and industrial resources (Delai and Takahashi, 2011; Liu et al., 2021b). When transforming and utilizing film-induced cultural resources, do not trample or destroy the ecological environment for tourism development, and comprehensively optimize the tourism environment and tourism routes. Environmentalism and related laws and regulations have begun to pay attention to tourists’ needs (Li et al., 2020). Hence, the further integration of culture and tourism can reflect the transformation of the overall ecological commitment (Zhou et al., 2021), and the resulting human–environment relationship has become a new aspect of sustainable development.

In the dimension of sustainable social development, on the one hand, the improvement of cultural quality of the whole society is a prerequisite for the organic integration of culture and tourism (Tien et al., 2021), with harmonious coexistence becoming the core aspect of economic and cultural development of the new era, tourists and other stakeholders of the film-induced tourism industry begins to focus on human capital development, social recognition, job creation, and health and safety-related issues (Choi and Ng, 2011). With the deepening of research, researchers found that the above-mentioned problems are ideologically attributed to culture and are the society’s force for inducing the sustainable development of industries (Cai and Zhou, 2014). The extension and connotation of tourism need the guidance of tourism culture. Cultural display or visitable production expands the scope of displayable culture, from material to non-material, to the integration of non-material and material, and then to the contemporary creative cultural display, which makes culture continuously “commoditized” (Silberberg, 1995; Marques and Pinho, 2021). At present, many scholars have reached a consensus that the integration of culture and industry can promote the construction of the social community (Jakhar, 2017; Yi et al., 2021b) and promote the relevant members of the society to change their misconduct, thereby strengthening the sustainable development of the film and television industry and the tourism industry.

In the dimension of sustainable economic development, scholars generally agree that economic factors, which refer to the renewable and non-renewable resources invested in the production process, are composed of factors, such as cost, profit, and business development (Mamede and Gomes, 2014; Wagner, 2015). Given the direct impact of economic effect on tourist activities is significant, most researchers directly view economic factors as the main driving force for the sustainable development of film-induced tourism, owing to the direct influence of economic effects on tourists’ tourism activities (Horbach et al., 2013; Hojnik and Ruzzier, 2016). As been defined by researchers, sustainable economic development involves the exploration and innovation of business models, creating market opportunities, the processes of resolving unsustainable environmental and social problems (Schaltegger et al., 2016). When film-induced culture is continuously produced into cultural tourism products, the commercial interests of tourism sales promote the industrialization and gradually form a complete industrial chain-cultural tourism industry. In the studies of film-induced tourism, many researchers view film-induced culture as a resource for creating new business models and market opportunities and regard the integration of film-induced culture with the tourism industry as a solution for unsustainable development problems. In summary, in film-induced tourism, in both the ecological, social, and economic dimensions, the integration of culture and industry will influence the path of sustainable development. Hence, the following hypotheses are proposed:

Above all, we proposed the following effect hypothesis:

To get a better and professional understanding of the dynamic mechanism of the culture and industry associated with film-induced tourism, the research subjects are limited to the management staff of the film-induced tourism industry. A total of 1,200 questionnaires were distributed, and 1,054 valid questionnaires were collected, with a recovery rate of 87.8%. The collected questionnaires were randomly divided into two equal sets (527 questionnaires in each set): one dataset is used for exploratory factor analysis and the other is used for confirmatory factor analysis. The demographic characteristics of the sample population are shown in Table 1. From Table 1 we can see, most of the responders are males (accounting for 68.9%), in the age groups of 25–35 and 36–45 (the total number of the two age groups accounting for 65.3%) and have a bachelor’s degree (accounting for 54.9%). 28% of the responders are tourism area managers; 34.7% of the responders are government department managers; and 37.3% of the responders are general staff. And the demographic characteristics of the responders generally follow the demographic distribution of the entire population in the area, indicating a good representativeness of the data and makes it an effective data source.

We draw on the mature scales used in previous studies for reference, and the initial scale was formed after corresponding modifications according to research topic. Then, two scholars who have been engaged in film-induced tourism and sustainable development were invited for analysis and discussion, and the scale was modified and improved. We use 5-level Likert scale to measure all variables, with 1 indicating “very unimportant” and 5 indicating “very important.” The specific measurement items and reliability are shown in the appendix. In addition, SPSS 26.0 was used for validity test, and KMO was 0.906 (>0.8). The results show that the scale has good reliability and validity, indicating that there is internal consistency among the variables (Table 2).

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) showed (Table 3) that P<0.01, and the Composite Reliability of all variables was 0.622–0.865, so that the polymerization validity and the convergence validity is good. AVE was in a reasonable range. Therefore, the results of CFA all meet the standard, and all dimensions have good convergence validity.

Through the correlation coefficient test, it can be seen that the values below the diagonal are, respectively, the correlation coefficients between potential variables (Table 4). Each potential variable has different connotations in theory, and each variable has relatively high correlation and good discriminant validity.

Based on the previous research results, the path relationship diagram between potential variables and observed variables has been built, the goodness of fit of the model to be verified have been tested from AMOS 26.0. The main fitting indicators all meet the ideal standard, that is, the model fitting effect is ideal.

In order to further test the hypothesis proposed above, we run a structural equation model with mediation (see Figure 1). The results are shown in Table 5. There is a correlation between film-induced culture and film-induced industry (r = 0.720). Film-induced culture has a significant impact on the degree of integration (r = 0.590, CR = 7.495, p < 0.01); The film-induced tourism industry has a significant impact on the degree of integration (r = 0.441, CR = 6.326, p < 0.01), then hypothesis 1a, 1b, 1c are supported. The degree of integration has a significant positive impact on film-induced tourism (r = 0.836, CR = 11.817, p < 0.01), so hypothesis 2a, 2B, and 2C are also supported.

In order to test the reliability of the path hypothesis, we further use Bootstrapping to calculate the mediating effect of culture and tourism integration. Bootstrapping test performs 3,000 samplings and selects a 95% confidence interval, then the final test results are shown in Table 6, so both hypothesis H3a and H3b are assumed to hold (Table 7).

Given previous scholars’ studies on film-induced tourism (Ringle, 2018; Marafa et al., 2020), we assume that cultural tourism will significantly affect the dynamic mechanism of sustainable development. More specifically, we believe that the organic integration of film-induced culture and tourism industry will have a significant impact on economic, social, and ecological sustainable development, which are the three dimensions of sustainable development. The results generally support our hypothesis that we view culture and tourism as a systematic whole rather than separate them and that culture and tourism integration is not simply “culture + tourism” or “tourism + culture.” We also confirm that the degree of integration of film-induced culture and tourism industry plays an important mediate role in the sustainable development of film-induced tourism. Although culture and tourism seem to be combined with each other in contemporary society, they have not developed the sustainable development dynamics of products and services innovation, nor developed a systematic operation mechanism. Consequently, the integration of culture and tourism is not to mechanically copy the two independent elements, but the key lies in the functional replacement and format innovation, complementary advantages, and the optimal combination of industrial elements.

As culture and tourism are two huge and complex systems, both have relatively mature management operation mechanism, working path, industrial rules, and industry norms, while they are currently characterized by high growth and rapid development (Richards, 2018; McKercher, 2020). Therefore, in constructing the path of the integration of culture and tourism to promote sustainable development, the resource characteristics, functional differences, and technological advantages of film-induced culture and tourism industry should be fully considered in theory, and their similarity and relevance should be taken into account. In practice, we should not only make full use of the location conditions, resource endowments, and social and economic systems of film-induced culture and tourism destinations, but constantly identify the intersection points of products, industries, and enterprises according to the changes in market demand, and construct diversified industrial integration modes according to local conditions to determine develop directions in the integration of resources, technology, market and products, and administrative management.

From the perspective of tourism industry, support the development of organization forms that meet the needs of film-induced tourism development. The integration of industry should finally be reflected in the integration of organizations. Although the fundamental dynamics for the development of film-induced tourism is the development of market demand (Connell, 2005), it needs enterprises to be discovered and satisfied to find business opportunities. We suggest relevant departments relax film-induced tourism business licensing, strengthen information services, support enterprises to explore new business areas, support various cooperation, and even merger and acquisitions. From the perspective of film-induced culture, enrich the cultural connotation of film-induced tourism. Film-induced tourism should not be equated with general implanted advertising or simply build film-induced bases, but should dig deeply into the cultural connotation of film-induced tourism, closely focus on the core theme of film/television works, and deeply develop “post-film products” related to tourism derivative industry, and then systematically integrate them to form a cross-industry and compound film-induced tourism industry chain (Young and Young, 2008; Fan and Yu, 2021). In order to promote sustainable development, we further suppose that we should strengthen the research on film-induced tourism and explore the development mode and regulations of film-induced tourism.

This study provides some enlightenments on the theoretical exploration and practical management of film-induced tourism. Inevitably, there are several limitations, which can be addressed in future studies. First, the verification of the hypotheses is through the empirical analysis of collected questionnaires, lacking the support of actual cases. This can be improved by case analysis in follow-up studies. Second, the degree of integration between culture and industry is measured and defined by their characteristics in this study. However, the integration may also be affected by their underlying relationship. Their spatial production characteristics are also valuable for further investigation. In summary, in this research, the dynamic mechanism for sustainable development of film-induced tourism has been investigated, and conclusions have been drawn. This topic, however, still requires in-depth follow-up investigations from the research community.