Nollywood: a Peek at a Booming Film Industry

Posted on 19, 2004
Filed under International Film

With all of the hype surrounding the Indian film Industry, I thought it would be interesting to take a peek at another high-growth film market -- Nigeria, otherwise known as "Nollywood." According to AFP, Nollywood is a high growth industry controlled by cutthroat moguls who would give Weinstein a run for his money. Rapidly growing throughout the nineties, Nollywood is now doing anywhere between $100-600 million dollars in business a year. With more than 2,500 films produced annually, Nigerian film companies release their films in scatter-shot fashion -- a rough mix of makeshift screening rooms and cheap, mass produced copies. Apparently, sales of 100,000 copies of a popular new release is par for the course in this country of 124 million.

This got me to thinking about the industry here in the good ol' USA. With the proliferation of high-quality prosumer cameras and cheap, full-featured desktop editing systems, are we in for the same kind of "content glut" as Nigeria? I think that Indie filmmakers here at home probably churn out at least as many films, and as the quality continues to increase, they're gonna go somewhere....