At the Lights, Legacy and Leaps showcase in Lagos, FilmOne CEO Kene Okwuosa stood before a packed room of filmmakers, exhibitors, and press and declared what everyone in the cinema business had been waiting to hear: “Our cinema is beyond recovery. We’re in our growth phase.”
It wasn’t just talk. With Filmhouse projecting three million admissions by year-end, the group’s distribution arm, FilmOne Entertainment, revealed one of its biggest partnerships yet; it will now manage the Nigerian theatrical slate for Amazon MGM Studios, a subsidiary of Amazon.
For years, FilmOne has built a reputation as Nollywood’s most audacious distributor, steering both local blockbusters and international titles through the country’s unpredictable box-office terrain. Now, with the Amazon-MGM deal, the company moves into an even more strategic position, one that ties Nigerian exhibition directly to Hollywood’s evolving global strategy.
The collaboration marks a new kind of crossover: a local distributor trusted to handle one of the world’s biggest studio pipelines. Beyond the prestige, it signals confidence in the market, in Nigerian audiences, and in the sustainability of African cinema-going culture.
For Amazon MGM Studios, the partnership makes sense. Nigeria remains the continent’s largest theatrical market, and FilmOne’s dual role as distributor and exhibitor (through its sister company, Filmhouse Cinemas) means it controls a significant part of the cinema value chain. The deal ensures that Amazon MGM’s releases, from prestige dramas to blockbuster franchises, get properly localised, marketed, and brought to Nigerian screens with the cultural understanding only a domestic partner can provide.
While details of the arrangement remain under wraps, insiders describe it as “a full management slate”, suggesting FilmOne will oversee theatrical rollouts, scheduling, and marketing for Amazon MGM titles across Nigeria, possibly extending to other West African territories.
For local audiences, that could mean earlier access to major global releases and a more robust theatrical calendar. For FilmOne, it strengthens its positioning as both a local tastemaker and an international conduit, a company equally at home pushing homegrown films like ‘Colours of Fire’ as it is distributing Hollywood titles.
The announcement landed at a time when optimism is slowly returning to Nigerian exhibition. The pandemic hit cinemas hard, but the data shows an audience that never really left. If FilmOne can leverage this Amazon-MGM partnership to boost audience turnout while maintaining support for Nollywood releases, it could set a new standard for how international studios engage with African markets.
It is a reminder that Nollywood’s story isn’t just about production anymore. Distribution, who gets the films into theatres, how they’re marketed, and how audiences experience them, is becoming just as important. And with this new deal, FilmOne isn’t just distributing movies; it’s rewriting what a Nigerian company’s place in the global film ecosystem can look like.
