By Ifeanyi Okonkwo
In Nollywood today, making a good film is no longer enough. The industry’s biggest challenge is not storytelling, but visibility. Promotion has evolved from a campaign into a full-time performance, and filmmakers are increasingly expected to sell their work as loudly and relentlessly as they create it.
The Burden on Filmmakers
Unlike Hollywood, Nollywood lacks strong institutional support structures—robust studios, marketing agencies, and distribution networks. As a result, the responsibility of promotion collapses inward. The filmmaker becomes the engine of visibility, expected to dance, post, joke, style, and constantly animate their work online. When that engine stalls, the film risks disappearing.
Winners and Exhaustion
This system creates an uneven playing field. Those with resources, charisma, and brand equity thrive. Those without struggle, regardless of the quality of their films. Over time, one model of success—constant online performance—begins to look like the only model. For some creators, this is energizing. For others, it is draining, not because they lack creativity, but because they did not enter filmmaking to become perpetual content.
The Debate: Afolayan vs. Akindele
Recent public comments by Kunle Afolayan and the equally public response by Funke Akindele highlighted this tension. Afolayan voiced discomfort with the exhausting promotional climate, while Akindele demonstrated how mastering visibility can lead to commercial triumph. Both perspectives are valid, and together they reveal Nollywood’s dilemma: how to balance creative integrity with marketing demands.
Structural Gaps
In more mature film industries, promotion is distributed across networks—studios, distributors, publicists, critics, and festivals. In Nollywood, these structures remain weak. Marketing budgets are personal gambles, cinema economics are opaque, and social media amplifies everything, often reducing nuanced critique to personality-driven noise.
Ovation’s Take
The real question Nollywood must answer is not whether filmmakers should dance or not dance, post or not post. It is whether the industry can build a future where success is not conditional on exhaustion. Until stronger support systems emerge, debates about marketing will continue to resurface, reflecting the growing pains of an industry negotiating its identity in public.
