In the final years of the 20th century, a community of Nigerians began to collaborate to produce what they hoped would be very entertaining content.
They mostly had no long-term plans or any plans at all. The best of them had done theatre work in Europe. Many were raw, untrained, untested. All they had was a passion.
With very meagre budgets, this group made films that today are nothing short of premium classics; Ripples, Diamond Ring, Living in Bondage, Koto Aye, Issakaba.
Many nights, young Nigerians living relatively peaceful lives after years under a fleet of military dictators gathered to catch the latest episodes of Papa Ajasco or Fuji House of Commotion. In those days, there were many shows on TV and many of them were good.
That community of creators built what became the Nigerian film industry and they took up the name Nollywood. Watching Nollywood was always an event when it started with VHS in the 1990s.
Then DVDs came, and the internet later, and their once loyal audience departed, favouring big-budget, better-made Western content that promoted Western cultures. Their audience started talking about high school and college. They carried school bags with massive posters of Spider-Man and drank in Hannah Montana water bottles.
It turned out, Nollywood was not always a perfect event. There were problems. Actors were paid too little, films were made too quickly and they made little money.
But even this turned out to be a much-needed watershed moment for the industry to reassess its unique offering, beef up its budget and produce better work.
After years of work, new life was breathed into the industry at the turn of the last decade. The product could be better and the filmmakers themselves knew this. So once again the community came together to re-strategise.
They took their films to the cinemas to make more money. They paid themselves better. They got more investors. They told stories that challenged the status quo and it paid off. In 2013, Nollywood produced films valued at $5.1 billion according to data by PwC.
In 2021, the industry was valued at $6.4 billion. The same data estimates that Nollywood would generate $14.82 billion in revenue in 2025.
But this success has not been without its problems. You see, after the audience left, Nollywood has been trying to bring them back. The push has been aggressive but the burden has fallen heavily on the actors. “Nollywood is very star-driven,” the marketer, Iremhen Ilozobhie, told Pulse. “If you look at the films that have made the numbers in recent years, they are films that are star-driven.”
It is a good thing that the stars of Nollywood can have their faces on the poster of a film and the audience will pay to watch it. However, the actors cannot be burdened with this work alone if the industry must grow structurally. Films should be able to sell themselves just because they are great.
From the casting directors to the producers to the actors themselves, there has been a push to create new strategies to make films that do not need to have stars to succeed at the box office. Storytelling can be better, budget can be better, production can be better, and salaries can be better. It turned out that the old evils that led to its dip in audience engagement many years ago have not been entirely excommunicated. The industry, years later, still had deep structural problems.
The community that is doing the work of fixing it is not the same community that came together more than three decades ago with a passion for filmmaking. There are more hands now working to bring a film together. These days, they need more money to make films. There are studios, registered businesses like EbonyLife Films, Ink Blot Productions, Anthill Studios dedicated to making and promoting films on a daily basis.
The Nollywood of today has a better direction, it wants to grow, it wants to prove to investors that they can bet on it, and it wants to sweat. It's not just a few friends running things among themselves. It is a community of passionate people jumping through hoops every day, circumventing problems to bring the very best of Nigerian cinema to the world.
Who are they? What do they do? How do they do it?
In a series of interviews that we will publish this week, Pulse Nigeria will offer answers to all of these questions. We are speaking to the brains behind some of the biggest Nollywood productions in the last five years. You will get to know them personally, understand the work they do better, get a glimpse of how much they make, and their tips on how you too, if you wish, can join this community of passionate creators.