By Olaoluwa Ayodele
Last year was indeed a great year for the Nigeria movie industry. The year saw the premier of multi million naira movies like Fifty by Mo’Abudu, Road To Yesterday by Genevieve Nnaji, Dry by Stephanie Linus and many other box office movies. Still, the Nigerian movie industry still has a lot to put in places.
Nollywood, which has been ranked as the third largest movie industry in the world after Hollywood and Bollywood, still has challenges combating the industry. Popular perception of Nigerians movie industry is that most producers are less concerned about the quality of movie rather, they are after the quantity of sales.
But recently, some producers have taken it upon themselves to stand out among others by pursuing quality. Film Makers such as Kunle Afolayan, Obi Emelonye, Biyi Bandele and others have, in their own little ways, rebranded the industry with good and quality movies. Despite the fact that these set of film makers try as much as possible to produce good films, they still suffer the pains of their works falling into the hands of pirates, which is the major challenge in the industry.
The industry is also feeling the impact of the hash economic situation of the country. It was recently reported that some movie artist now act movies on credit because producers cannot assess fund.
The President of Actors Guild of Nigeria FCT chapter recently expressed concern over actors’ acceptance of roles on credit due to the current economic realities in the country. Onwura said: “Movie producers are not left out in the current economic challenges facing everyone. Most financiers and investors have developed cold feet to investing in productions.
“Instead of losing entirely, the actors and the producers had to sign a pact to take roles and receive payment after such movie is released”he lamented.
Another quagmire the industry is facing is piracy. Though the present administration has promised to fight piracy, Research shows that 90% of the movies produced in Nigeria are been pirated. Piracy has continued to be a major setback for the industry to the extent that the producers hardly make profit. Although most of the movie producers and artistes are seen in posh cars and island homes, they exclaimed that they are acquired from other sources and not filmmaking.
In Nigeria, majority of the filmmaking is the hands of private entrepreneurs who has little or no training in film production. Their main motive is profit making .
Some of this untrained producers decide artists they want to be featured in the movie either fit for the roles or not and this has caused major downturn in the industry.
However, despite all these travails, the movie industry has continued to prevail.
