Environmental pollution, climate change, ecological destruction and other issues have become serious social challenges. In order to control pollution and promote the development of green industries, the Chinese government has vigorously developed green and emerging industries such as the cultural industry, and put forward the strategic goal of “double carbon”. Based on this background, this paper selects China’s provincial cultural industry as the research object to carry out an empirical study on its innovation efficiency and its influencing factors. By selecting the panel data from 2014 to 2021, using the output oriented CRS super efficiency model, cross reference Malmuqist model and panel regression model, this paper draws the following conclusions: (1) the innovation efficiency of cultural industry in different regions of China has typical spatio-temporal heterogeneity. The efficiency of cultural innovation fluctuates at 1.0, and is the highest in the eastern region and the lowest in the western region. (2) The innovation efficiency of China’s cultural industry has maintained a good growth trend, and the Malmuqist index as a whole is greater than 1.0. (3) Environmental variables such as air pollution, domestic pollution and pollution control have significant effects on innovation efficiency. All environmental variables passed the significance test at the 5% level.