Nollywood Goes Netflix

Thanks to streaming, Nigeria’s film industry could finally get its global close-up.

In December 2018, EbonyLife Films, a studio in Lagos, Nigeria, premiered Chief Daddy, a feature-length drama about an eccentric billionaire who dies suddenly, touching offa madcap scramble among his relatives over his estate. The movie was an immediate hit with audiences in Nigeria. By the end of the month it had emerged as the country’s most popular theatrical release of the year.

Not long ago the economic life cycle of Chief Daddy might have ended there. Nollywood, the nickname for Nigeria’s robust film industry, has long been hamstrung by piracy. For years film makers have watched with frustration as swarms of illegitimate DVDs quickly overwhelmed their promising cinematic efforts, slashing potential profits and making it difficult to raise money to produce future films.

But in the spring of 2019 the makers of Chief Daddy managed to cash in on a new window of opportunity, this time online. EbonyLife sold the movie’s global streaming rights to Netflix Inc., for an undisclosed sum. In March the streaming service made the movie available to 149 million customers in 190 countries, most of whom live well beyond the reach of those pirated DVDs.

“As a continent, Africa has remained creatively silent for centuries, our stories are seldom told outside of our families and villages and often from the perspective of someone looking in,” says Mo Abudu, chief executive officer of EbonyLife. The arrival of streaming technology has the potential to upend that dynamic and introduce Nigerian films to a much broader market on both sides of the Atlantic, she says: “Now is a good opportunity for more capital to be pumped into Nollywood.”