Tolulope ajayi

Every year we gather to have countless conversations about Nollywood and its challenges. One forum to another. Seminars, keynotes, investor sessions. The list goes on. The more of these you attend, the more you notice a few things. One, a lot of people are winging it. Two, many investors don't understand our business model, because frankly it doesn't make sense to them. Three, some of us aren't sure if we really want change or just want to cash out so we can pay school fees. We say distribution is our biggest problem. We have been saying it for years. So why haven't we fixed it? It's one thing to name a problem. It's another thing to understand it and actually have solutions. If the streaming era and this economy taught us anything, it's that a huge number of Nigerians can't afford to stream. Many can't afford the data. And most importantly, the audience that matters can't always relate to what's on the platform. Nigeria makes up about 10.5% of Netflix viewers in Africa. South Africa makes up 73%. But don't be fooled. Nigerians are watching. They're watching on Telegram, where it feels free and the files are small enough to download. The demand is there. What's missing is a price and a format that works for them. Now look at cinema. Around 350 screens for over 200 million people. That's roughly one screen for every 600,000 Nigerians. Tickets average close to 6k and run up to 10k in Lagos. Last year we recorded 2.8 million admissions. That's about 1% of our population, and since many of those are repeat visits, the real number of people is even smaller. Then there's the cost of making films. I've said it before: a staggering number of cinema releases don't break even. Only the greats do. And then there's the hunger for the Western gaze. It's not a bad thing in itself. But we push so hard on "taking our stories global" and "see me, I can speak your language" that we forget to sell our stories to ourselves first. It's the Afrobeats conversation all over again. A few things are glaring. Access to content is expensive. The alternatives are expensive too. So buying content is a challenge for most people. We all know this. It's not rocket science. It's been a terrible year for a lot of people in this industry. I'm not knocking the festivals. But we'll all go, party, network, then go home and drink garri. Then send that DM to our egbon producer saying we haven't worked in seven months. Or we took a loan to make a film, did a big premiere, and made 4 million in seven weeks. We have to rework the entire model. Access. Stop building only multiplexes. Invest in smaller units and put more screens in front of more people. Price. Bring ticket prices down to what ordinary Nigerians can pay. Content. Back smaller producers and bring down the cost of production. Localise. Make films for specific regions, in the languages and stories people there live with. Tiers. Group films by budget and audience, so small films build the cinema-going habit and the big films ride on those screens. Long term. Give filmmakers incentives to build careers, not just one-off releases. This is India's playbook. Cheap tickets, local-language films, screens where the culture already lives. It's why India sells hundreds of millions of tickets a year. These are the conversations we should be having, and investors and stakeholders should be acting on them. If we truly value this industry