With three expensive cinema outings landing in the same short window, most Nigerians simply won’t be able to justify paying for all three in

For years, we’ve treated a box office figure the way we treat a scoreline, final, factual, beyond dispute.

James Abinibi’s One Gidi Night arrived at Nigerian cinemas on September 11 wearing the label “neo-noir”.

Somebody needs to say it plainly: the Nigerian film premiere, as it currently exists, is not a marketing event. It is a cremation ceremony f

One problem with the “Old Nollywood versus New Nollywood” argument is that it starts the history too late. Nollywood did not begin with Livi

Blessing Uzzi, let’s get one thing straight, nobody is questioning the fact that Call of My Life is doing well at the box office.

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

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.

We do not have to choose between being commercial and being excellent. We do not have to choose between being Nigerian and being global. My Father's Shadow shows that the shadow of our fathers, the weight of what was promised and not delivered, in families and in nations, can be transformed into art that the whole world wants to sit inside. And proof, in cinema, is everything."