Let's be honest about what Nollywood actually was before anyone dared call it an industry worth billions. It was a N150 VCD from the man at

To understand why Adeyemi's silence lands as hard as it does, you have to sit with what the book actually was, not just what the trailer is promising. Children of Blood and Bone didn't sell over three million copies and debut at number one on the New York Times bestseller list because it was a competent fantasy adventure with African scenery.

Here's the uncomfortable structural truth underneath all of this: Nollywood, as it currently operates, has no real mechanism for measuring an actor's growth, so it has quietly substituted something easier to measure instead, reliability. Can this person deliver the same performance, on time, without drama, in a way the audience has already proven it will pay for?

Nollywood has an entire informal apparatus for policing what's "decent", actors get dragged for kissing a co-star while married, producers g

Somewhere along the line, Nollywood actors decided that their job ends the moment the director calls cut, and I need us to be honest about h

Sit with anybody who has spent more than three years in Nollywood; actor, writer, DOP, marketer, PA, anybody, and give them one drink and thirty minutes. The story will come out. The producer who used their concept after a "let's just discuss it first" meeting. The director who replaced them mid-project and let them find out from an Instagram flyer.

Every panel, every pitch deck, every government speech about Nollywood opens the same way: “Nigeria is the second-largest film industry in the world by volume.” We say it with our chest. We print it in proposals. Investors hear it before they hear anything else about us. It has become the national anthem of Nigerian film, everybody stands up for it, nobody remembers who composed it.

Here is the part nobody in those rooms wants to say out loud: giving film funds to established players is not "de-risking" the investment, i

Let us start by giving credit where it is due, because I am not here to mock ambition, Lord knows this industry could use more of it. Nora Awolowo and Rixel Studios, in partnership with FilmOne and Switch Visuals, have announced that Black Market will premiere on 26 September at Tafawa Balewa Square with a target of 50,000 seated attendees, an official Guinness World Records attempt to surpass the current mark of roughly 43,000 people watching a film in a single location.

Every few weeks, a Nollywood film announces itself the same way: a popular skit-maker collects between two and ten million naira, posts a two-minute comedy sketch loosely themed around the movie, and the production company reposts it with fire emojis, congratulating themselves on "buzz."

If you want to understand everything wrong with the Nollywood remake era, you only need one case study. The 1994 Glamour Girls was a grenade. Kenneth Nnebue and Chika Onukwufor made a film about women navigating sex work, sugar relationships, and survival in a Lagos that chewed people up, and they made it without flinching.

In Hollywood, "A-list" isn't a vibe or a vote, it's tied to a real, if imperfect, industry tool called the Ulmer Scale, a 100-point system entertainment journalist James Ulmer built specifically to quantify a star's value in getting a film financed and the cameras rolling.

Think back to the biggest names in Nollywood around 2016, then compare that mental list with today's biggest box-office attractions. Surprisingly little has changed. While a few new actors have risen in profile, the industry's commercial backbone is still largely carried by the same generation of stars.

Nollywood has become exceptionally good at marketing premieres, but not always at marketing films. Somewhere along the way, the red carpet became the main event, while the actual cinema run became an afterthought. A packed premiere may generate headlines for a night, but it's the second, third, and fourth weekends that determine whether a film truly connects with audiences. Perhaps it's time we stopped celebrating the launch as though it were the destination.

Every few years, African film lovers find themselves trapped in the same debate: Who tells better stories, Nigeria or South Africa? The problem is that most people approach the argument from the wrong angle.

MTN is asking Nigerians to trust it with their entertainment hours on a network that the company itself cannot guarantee. It is launching a data-intensive service in an era when its own data pricing has attracted national protests and a public forum called 'Data on Trial.' Content is not the supporting act. Content is the whole show. And MTN has not told us what it plans to put on stage.

The marketing campaign behind Call of My Life offers a fresh alternative to Nollywood's trend-driven promotional playbook, proving that strategic storytelling can be just as effective as viral content. No dance challenges dominated social media. There were no forced attempts to join trending conversations. No obvious strategies to make the film seem relevant to unconnected topics. Instead, the marketing returned to a single, clear promise: that this was a feel-good romantic c

A film can be showing in 50 locations and still be practically invisible if it receives poor showtimes.

There is something we urgently need to understand about film awards, especially awards as culturally significant as the Africa Magic Viewers’ Choice Awards (AMVCA). Awards are not just glamorous ceremonies. They are not merely red carpets, fashion statements, celebrity moments, or viral acceptance speeches designed for social media engagement.

One of the biggest misconceptions in Nollywood is that royalties are some kind of bonus, a lucky outcome when a film performs well. That idea is fundamentally flawed. In structured industries, royalties (or residuals) are not rewards, they are pre-designed financial outcomes built into contracts, enforced by institutions, and backed by law.