Nollywood Must Stop Producing Many Crappy Movies
The popularity of the phenomenon of Nollywood was based on overproduction of cheap home videos widely distributed and pirated in Nigeria and neighbouring countries in West Africa from VHS tapes to DVDs on the streets before the launching of cable TV channels between 2001 and 2004 and then uploaded by several authorized and unauthtorized people on YouTube from 2005 ; followed by the launching of Ibaka TV and iROKOtv in 2011.
The proliferation of low budget home videos in Nigeria made Nollywood the second largest producer of movies in the world after the Bollywood of India; making news headlines all over the world and attracting both International vendors and investors.
The biggest video streaming services in the world led by Netflix and Amazon are now competing for the best of the film and TV productions in Nollywood which compelled the producers to improve the quality of their movies to satisfy the criteria for international acquisition and distribution. But quantity is still the focus of the majority of producers and the production of substandard movies is doing more harm than good to the sustainable development of Nollywood and the Nigerian film industry.
The productions of cheap movies have left the few cable TV channels and streaming services saturated with movies which subsequently reduced the market value of Nigerian movies in comparison to South African, South Korean, Mexican and Indian movies in international acquisition and distribution.
Did the highly esteemed actors read the screenplays before acting their idiotic roles? Or the temptations of being paid hundreds of thousands of naira made them to skip and waive professional standards?
We have submissions of hundreds of Nigerian movies and yet international buyers can only accept less than 20 movies every quarter.
Many producers are now selling their movies for less than the costs of the productions.
The local TV stations are now rejecting many movies, because they are saturated with dozens of movies and series submitted to them.
The local TV stations don't need to produce original movies and series, because they are cheaper to acquire from hundreds of unsolicited movies and series sent to them.
It is not good to produce more than 1, 000 movies every year, but we can only count the best on our fingertips.
Publisher/Editor,
Tuesday, July 12, 2022.
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