We Bought the Classics, Killed Them, and Called It a Comeback: Nollywood's Remake Problem

Glamour Girls

The Great Nostalgia Heist

Somewhere around 2019, Nollywood discovered a business model Hollywood had been running for decades: don't build a new audience, buy an old one. Charles Okpaleke and Play Network Studios went on a shopping spree for the rights to our most sacred titles, Living in Bondage, Nneka the Pretty Serpent, Rattlesnake, Glamour Girls, even Aki na Ukwa, and for a moment, it felt like genius. These were films burned into the memory of anyone who grew up passing a VHS between neighbours. The nostalgia was pre-sold. The marketing wrote itself. Twitter did the promo for free. But here's the thing nobody wanted to say out loud at those glittering premieres: we weren't remaking films. We were remaking titles. The name came back. The poster came back. The thing that made the original unforgettable, the danger, the desperation, the point, stayed buried in 1994. And we all clapped anyway, because the lighting was nice.

Glamour Girls: A Crime Scene in 4K

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. It was scandalous because Nigeria was scandalous, and the film had the nerve to say so. The 2022 remake, released to Netflix's global audience, took that grenade and turned it into a perfume ad. Beautiful women, beautiful houses, beautiful cars, and absolutely nothing at stake. Critics tore it apart; I did. Audiences turned it into a punchline, and the discourse lasted longer than anyone's memory of the actual plot. The original was dangerous cinema made with no money. The remake was expensive content made with no danger. We took a film about survival and remade it as a film about aesthetics, which, if we're being honest, might be the most accurate self-portrait New Nollywood has ever produced.

The Exception That Indicts Everyone

Now, before anyone says remakes simply can't work here, Living in Bondage: Breaking Free exists, and it's the receipt that convicts everybody else. Ramsey Nouah's 2019 film succeeded critically and commercially for one reason: it wasn't actually a remake. It was a continuation. It didn't re-shoot Andy Okeke's story with better cameras; it asked what that world of ritual wealth, greed, and consequence looks like a generation later, and it brought Kenneth Okonkwo back not as a nostalgia cameo but as a man still carrying his sins. It understood that the 1992 original wasn't iconic because of its production values, God knows it wasn't, it was iconic because it named the thing Nigerian society was whispering about: what men will trade for money. Breaking Free updated the theme, not just the wardrobe. Which means the blueprint for doing this properly existed first, in 2019, before the remake wave even peaked. Everyone who fumbled afterwards can't claim they didn't know. They watched the masterclass and still submitted the wrong assignment.

Old Nollywood Had Nothing to Lose. That Was the Whole Point.

Here's the truth that should genuinely embarrass us: the classics were brave because they were broke. The Nollywood of the '90s was an industry of marketers in Idumota and Onitsha gambling on VHS tapes, with no Netflix executives, no brand-safety concerns, no premiere aesthetic to protect. So it made films about ritual killings, cults, sex work, madness, and moral rot, because that was the country outside the window, and nobody upstairs could say no. Today's Nollywood has millions of naira, international streaming deals, and billion-naira box office ambitions, and somewhere in that glow-up, it developed a fear of its own reflection. The remakes sanded off the occult dread, softened the desperation, glamourised the poverty, and delivered classics with the classic surgically removed. We remade the films and removed the point. A 1994 film shot on a shoestring is still being discussed thirty years later; its 2022 remake, made with a multiple of that budget, was forgotten in thirty days. That's not a production problem. That's a courage problem.

The Revivals That Might Actually Get It Right (And the One That Already Didn't)

Another credit where it's due, because 2026 is quietly offering us a live experiment in how to do this properly, and I'm cautiously optimistic about two titles in particular. Agbara Nla: The Return, hitting cinemas October 1, and The Return of Omotara Johnson, out July 10, share something none of the Play Network remakes had: custody of the soul. Agbara Nla isn't being remade by an outsider who licensed a title; it's being revived by the Bamiloye family itself, Damilola and Joshua Mike-Bamiloye directing, with Mike Bamiloye reprising Isawuru, the character that gave an entire generation of church kids sleepless nights. The people who understand why "Ayamatanga" still sends a chill down millennial spines are the ones holding the camera, and they're serving a massive faith-based audience that cinema Nollywood has ignored for decades. Bukky Wright, meanwhile, is running a masterclass in rollout: before her sequel touches a single cinema screen, she put the original Omotara Johnson Parts 1 and 2 on her own YouTube channel, rebuilding context, reintroducing the character to a generation that wasn't born in 2008, and warming up the audience on her own terms. That's not nostalgia strip-mining; that's franchise architecture. I understand this sequel’s language is mostly in English compared to the first parts, mostly in Yoruba. I strongly hope it won't pose a challenge, especially for those who grew up on the first parts. 

But before anyone gets carried away, this same year already handed us the cautionary tale: The Return of Arinzo. Iyabo Ojo assembled a pan-African, fifty-strong ensemble, Funke Akindele, Mercy Aigbe, Bimbo Akintola, stars from Ghana and Tanzania, for the sequel to her 2013 film, and critics were unanimous in the worst way: an overcrowded, tonally confused film juggling politics, crime, romance and spirituality without mastering any of them, leaning on narration because the story couldn't carry itself, and ultimately struggling to justify its own existence beyond name recognition. Same year, same industry, same nostalgia play, completely different homework. The difference isn't budget or star power; Arinzo arguably had more of both. The difference is whether you return to a story because it has something left to say, or because the title still trends.

The Billion-Naira Warning

And this is where it stops being about the past, because the remake era was a rehearsal for a mistake we're about to make at a much bigger scale. Nollywood is now a billion-naira theatrical industry. Behind The Scenes just crossed N2 billion, records are falling every December, and you can already hear the spreadsheets humming: if nostalgia sold once, imagine what a Nneka cinematic universe could do now. The temptation to strip-mine the archive, remake Domitilla again, reboot Karashika, drag every '90s title into the multiplex, will be enormous, because titles are cheaper than ideas and safer than risk. But the audience has already told us, loudly, what happens when you hand them a beloved name wrapped around an empty film. So here's the question I'll leave in the comments' capable hands: the old Nollywood, with no money, made films we still argue about three decades later. The new Nollywood, with all the money, can't remake them without embalming them. So which era actually understood cinema, and name me one Nollywood remake better than its original. I'll wait.