The trade-off of the golden era;
Long before YouTube came along and entirely rewrote the rules of Nigerian movies, Nollywood had a reputation for making, well…pretty bad movies but they were decent enough to watch and the flaws were easy to overlook, after all, we were a growing industry.
But back then, the lack of quality was beautifully balanced by visual scenery and cultural exploration.
Old-school Nollywood actually went outside. Production crews would travel to authentic villages, explore sprawling landscapes, and utilise massive, diverse location sets to match different scenes.
Through the eyes of those pioneer filmmakers, the audience got to explore the country, we saw how the Yorubas lived, the northern architecture, the Igbos “Umunna system”, and genuine regional aesthetics showcased on screen. It was an immersive experience for the Nigerian viewer, the African continent as a whole, and the diaspora.
If a movie was poorly written, it was easily compensated for by the raw, vibrant showcasing of the real environment and culture.
Furthermore, the industry used to rest entirely in the hands of a few powerful gatekeepers. These executive producers tightly controlled distribution, funding, and who got a shot at fame. The wealth generated by filmmaking was never distributed evenly; it remained concentrated at the top while independent creators starved for opportunities.
Then came YouTube, and boom! Everything changed.
Tired of begging traditional gatekeepers for a fraction of a chance, a few pioneer filmmakers took a massive gamble. They started posting full-length feature movies directly onto YouTube. At the time, it felt like a total downgrade. People literally wrinkled their noses and laughed, viewing the internet as a graveyard where low-budget, degraded films that never got a chance at traditional screens went to die.
But the gamble paid off spectacularly.
Suddenly, these dead YouTube movies were pulling in 500K views, 700K, and can you believe it, even a million views per movie? Nollywood has never seen this type of automatic shift before. The industry has never been this transparent, right at your fingertips, you could see the numbers growing, you could see the ad revenue piling up with each eyeball.
The financial blueprint was out, and once something works in Nollywood, you can be assured that other producers will completely lose their minds and overkill the formula. If a single storyline about a royal prince falling in love with a poor village girl becomes a blockbuster, a thousand other producers will copy it frame-for-frame until the audience is completely sick to their stomachs.
Now with other producers wanting a piece of the YouTube pie, the game began…
The Overnight Star Ecosystem
With the gold rush, Traditional producers and high-brow actors who once proudly swore they would never be caught dead on a YouTube set quietly turned back to the other side of their mouths. They rushed to YouTube because that is where 90% of the industry’s money sits today. Traditional gatekeepers might produce about 30 movies a year; meanwhile, the fast-paced YouTube circuit is churning out hundreds of films daily. If you refuse to adapt to the YouTube model as a modern Nollywood actor, you will simply starve cos that is where the production…the money lies.
This hyper-speed production model created a thrilling, highly lucrative ecosystem. Because movies are being shot every single day, actors are constantly booked back-to-back. To cope with the exhausting demand, producers had to build their own unique “armies” recruiting fresh crews and casting completely unknown faces. This led to a massive rise of overnight stars. Brand-new faces broke onto the screen, achieved viral success in a matter of weeks, and multi-tripled their earnings overnight.
But this exact low barrier to entry is what ultimately killed creativity and led to the current wave of terrible Nollywood films.
Making Of Bad Movies
These overnight stars, armed with zero professional training or artistic direction, suddenly became overnight producers just because they had the capital. Today, you don’t need expertise to make a Nollywood movie. All you need is a single, fully furnished shortlet apartment in Lagos, a camera, and a cast of four actors.
Producers will rent an apartment and squeeze the absolute life out of that location, using it to shoot ten different movies back-to-back. Then, they take those same four characters and make them shoot five entirely separate storylines in the exact same living room. You open a channel, and it’s the same faces, the same couch, the same lighting, over and over again. It is lazy, repetitive, and uninspired.
You know the absolute shock of it? Even seasoned producers, the ones that used to give us good movies, have realized how cheap it is to produce for YouTube, I mean, if others are doing it and being paid well for it, why then wouldn’t they cut cost and do it too?
If making bad movies is so lucrative, why not join in?
Masterpieces take time. A solid, compelling script requires at least 30 days of intellectual stretching to write properly. In the current YouTube matrix, a script is rushed through in two days, and the entire movie is shot and wrapped up in four days. How can you possibly build anything of substance under a single week?
The creative team is entirely burnt out. Writers are heavily underpaid by budget-pinching producers, meaning a single writing gig cannot clear their monthly bills. To survive, they grab as many writing jobs as humanly possible, rushing through them at lightning speed just to jump onto the next project.
As a writer myself, I have learnt to write at back-breaking pressure, even when I am losing my sanity, even when I feel like dying because no creative should work like this, I still go…Tap! Tap! Tap! on the laptop keys.
The actors are equally overwhelmed, moving mechanically from set to set from January to December without a single moment of breathing room. With that level of sheer physical and mental exertion, how can anyone give their best performance? They are shifting characters so fast they don’t even know who they are playing anymore.
Every once in a long while, a brilliant, groundbreaking movie emerges on YouTube that is completely worthy of global distribution on platforms like Netflix but right now, it feels like a one-in-a-million miracle.
Expertise and artistic training have been completely thrown out the window. If you have a quick budget and access to shortlet keys, you are automatically a filmmaker, and the art form is paying the ultimate price for it.
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