Nollywood’s Glorious Five Years

Nollywood’s successes over the past five years have been so diverse that what is happening can only be described as an entertainment boom.

Nigeria’s film industry, Nollywood, is relatively close-knit due to its manpower size and accessibility. The industry is made up of filmmakers and film professionals broken into smaller sub-industries such as Kannywood (Hausa-speaking movies), Asabawood (pidgin and Igbo-speaking movies), and more, depending on geographical location. Nollywood’s boom from 1992 and initial relevance came with the home video era where films were sold on VHS and later, CDs within and outside the shores of the country. With technological advancements and herculean efforts to fight piracy, some filmmakers took refuge in cinema releases and subsequently, the safer tenets of the ‘streaming wars’.

The last five years have easily been marked by growth and resilience due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which resulted in economic disruption that led to a 321 per cent fall in the Naira. Despite the setbacks, Nollywood has recorded great progress in several aspects of the industry from technological development to multi-million-dollar deals...