“Either you make films or make excuses”-Nollywood

Ethan Zuckerman reporting on Nollywood:

Nigeria’s film industry is the third largest in the world in financial terms, with revenues in the neighborhood of $200-300m a year, and it’s likely that Nigeria produces as many films per year as Bollywood. Films are made quickly and inexpensively – the budget is usually under $100,000, sometimes under $10,000 and filming rarely takes more than a month. The vast majority of these films go straight to video. Indeed, there’s almost no other market for Nigerian films – cinema operators tell us that the production quality of films isn’t high enough to allow them to be shown in theatres. As much as 70% of Indian film revenue comes from screenings, as does a substantial, though much smaller portion for Hollywood. (This whole paragraph is cribbed entirely from Dayo Ogunyemi’s excellent slide deck on Nigerian Film Financing, prepared for a 2009 WIPO meeting.)
Given that over 90% of revenue comes from home video sales, piracy is a problem in the Nigerian space. The politics of this are complicated – some producers told us off the record that the same distributors they rely on to market and sell their licensed wares are involved with pirating other producer’s movies.