The Nigerian film industry is a gold mine waiting to be tapped with piracy identified as one of the major obstacles hindering the sector from realising its potential, a report by the Financial Derivatives Company has stated.
According to the report, it takes an average of $10,000 to make a Nollywood film compared to Hollywood’s average budget range of $70 million to $100 million while a premiere blockbuster could cost between $200 million and $400million.
The report stated that one of the ways Nigeria could curtail piracy, even at the risk of limiting its citizens’ online freedom, would be by introducing online censorship for piracy sites as India did in 2017 after the Madras High Court ordered approximately 2,650 websites to be blocked nation-wide as an interim measure against the infringement of the copyright of certain films.
“The Nigerian movie industry is a potential gold mine waiting to be tapped, and though steps are being taken to unlock this potential, they barely scratch the surface. Nigerians must look towards the advanced film industries, their issues, and how they attempt to solve them and take note of what needs to be done to improve Nollywood,” the report said.
The FDC stated that there are only 68 cinema chains and about 218 screens for the country’s 200 million people. These cinemas, according to the report, are almost solely available in the main cities of Lagos, Abuja, Port Harcourt, and Kano. The FDC traced the history of the Nollywood industry as it is known today the release of ‘Living in Bondage’ in 1992 as the first Nollywood blockbuster that was released straight to video and the first movie to show how lucrative film making directly on video could be.
Nigeria have no media industry. What you do are dramas lacking in intellectual contents