At the halfway point of 2025, Nollywood Film Club — powered by Iroko Critic — gathered nollyphiles for a spirited three-hour conversation reflecting on the state of Nigerian cinema. In collaboration with Nollywire’s Nollyphile community and Nigeria Box Office, the discussion cut across box office hits, festival films, audience unpredictability, and the enduring difficulties of making films profitable in Nigeria.
Unsurprisingly, ‘Everybody Loves Jenifa’ and ‘Ori: The Rebirth’ dominated early exchanges. Funke Akindele’s sequel drew praise for its cultural reach, even if some questioned its reliance on nostalgia. “It’s fun, it’s loud, it’s exactly what people expect from Jenifa,” one participant noted, “But I’m not sure it pushes Nollywood forward.” ‘Ori: The Rebirth’, on the other hand, was singled out not just for its bold embrace of Yoruba folklore but also for its box office triumph. “The fact that Ori is the highest-grossing Nollywood film of the first half of the year tells you that audiences are ready for something different,” a speaker said.
That theme, the push and pull between crowd-pleasing familiarity and daring originality, ran through much of the discussion. Nollyphiles worried about Nollywood leaning too heavily on franchises at the expense of riskier storytelling. “Franchises make money, yes,” one voice argued, “But how many new stories are we refusing to greenlight because producers think only sequels sell?”
Star power was another recurring theme. Some nollyphiles argued that the presence of bankable actors still drives ticket sales more than story or craft. “People don’t always go to watch a film; they go to watch a face,” one participant noted, suggesting that Nollywood’s heavy dependence on celebrity appeal both sustains the industry and limits experimentation. The debate underscored how casting decisions remain tied to commercial survival in ways that shape what kinds of stories get told.
From there, the debate moved into the economics of filmmaking. Festival films were praised for taking Nigerian stories to global audiences, but participants were blunt about their limited financial impact at home. “You can win Toronto or Berlin and come back to Lagos broke,” one cinephile quipped, summing up the frustrations around prestige cinema. Others pointed to the imbalance in Nigeria’s exhibition system, with distribution still heavily skewed towards Lagos and Abuja. “If you’re not showing in Owerri, Kano, or Jos, you’re not really national. And that limits how much any film can truly make.”
The rise of streaming platforms brought another layer of tension. While some praised the access streaming offers, others argued it robs films of the collective energy of cinema-going. “A film trends on Netflix for three days and disappears,” one participant complained. “But when people go to the cinema, it becomes a conversation. You feel it in the culture.”
The unpredictability of Nigerian audiences was another point of fascination. Several contributors highlighted films that outperformed expectations against those that under-delivered. “Sometimes the so-called small films catch fire because they connect emotionally,” someone observed. “And then you have these big-budget projects that collapse because they were made for prestige, not for people.”
Despite the sharp critiques, the closing reflections captured a complicated kind of optimism. There was admiration for the sheer volume and ambition of Nollywood output, but also a candid recognition of its structural weaknesses. As one participant put it: “It’s hard to make money from films here; the costs, the distribution, the piracy, everything works against you. But the films still get made, and we still argue about them. That tells you Nollywood isn’t slowing down.”
The Nollywood Film Club conversation, backed by Iroko Critic and Nigeria Box Office, ultimately painted a portrait of an industry in flux – restless, imperfect, but impossible to ignore. Between billion-naira sequels, folklore-inspired hits, struggling festival darlings, and the streaming-versus-cinema tug of war, Nollywood’s first half of 2025 has been anything but boring.
