Despite a gloomy economy and an uncertain outlook, the Nigerian movie industry has just enjoyed its best year at the box-office with an amazing N1 billion from a record 50 locally-produced titles. After years of predictions, it seems that Nollywood is finally delivering on its promise and putting quality before quantity. As a result, movie-goers have rewarded the industry with a massive increase in cinema ticket sales. The N1 billion bonanza, represents nearly 30 per cent of the N3.5 billion generated from just 28 cinemas across Nigeria, which includes movies from Hollywood and around the world.

https://www.businessdayonline.com/the-wedding-party-defies-recession/

Orikinla1:
Many national leaders; from political leaders to religious leaders have been complaining about the hardships Nigerians are suffering under President Muhammadu Buhari, because of the economic recession. But why are new Nollywood movies breaking box office records at the cinemas in Nigeria at the same time?.
They have made more than N1Billion from the cinemas within two years that Nollywood movies did not make under the so called economic boom of former President Goodluck Jonathan in six years!

More thousands of Nigerians have been paying to see these new Nollywood movies in the midst of the economic recession.
So, if the economy is bad, why are operators of Nigerian cinemas smiling to the banks more than they did before the new government of President Buhari?

"The Wedding Party" alone has made more than N200 million in three weeks at the cinemas!
And the producers spent only N60million.

Check out the following highest grossing Nollywood movies since the election of President Buhari.

The Wedding Party N200,000,000
By Ebonylife Films / FilmOne / Inkblot Production / Koga Studios
Directed by Kemi Adetiba.

A Trip To Jamaica N176,100,000.
By Corporate World Pictures
Directed by Robert Peters.

Fifty N94,030,500
By EbonyLife Films.
Directed by Biyi Bandele.

Wives on Strike N71,300,000
By Dioni Visions.
Directed by Omoni Oboli.

Cheers to President Muhammadu Buhari!

It has nothing to do with Buhari...Wedding party came out during the Holidays when a lot of folks had returned from diaspora

asuustrike2009:

You're only implying.The main reason why the sudden demand for local movies is because local movies has improved. What links excess profit with investment?

Are you alright at all? How does the tripe above correlate with the OP's point that Nigerians still have enough disposable income to watch movies (whether local or foreign) and break sales records despite the recession? A feat never achieved under the last administration?

I've told you that you clearly lack the capacity to further your own argument so stop quoting me. You will be completely ignored from this point.

Orikinla1:


Then where did the millions of naira thousands of Nigerian movie-goers have spent at the cinemas during the recession come from?
From the clouds?

Mumu at the end of the day how much is 1 billion naira in Buhari dollars ,that's just 2 million dollars ..please stop deceiving urself ,it looks like they made much but infact they made much less than ever

Pro-dullards getting kicked in the groin on this thread.

DecemberIV:


Are you alright at all? How does the tripe above correlate with the OP's point that Nigerians still have enough disposable income to watch movies (whether local or foreign) and break sales records despite the recession? A feat never achieved under the last administration?

I've told you that you clearly lack the capacity to further your own argument so stop quoting me. You will be completely ignored from this point.

What make you think Nigerians have more disposal income as alleged by you? Have you being able to carry a thorough research to draw conclusion? How can you draw conclusion from mere sales of tickets without considering other factors? And who told you that during the previous administration there weren't high sales? What has personal business got to do with the government that doesn't give a damn on what they do?

DecemberIV:


Are you alright at all? How does the tripe above correlate with the OP's point that Nigerians still have enough disposable income to watch movies (whether local or foreign) and break sales records despite the recession? A feat never achieved under the last administration?

I've told you that you clearly lack the capacity to further your own argument so stop quoting me. You will be completely ignored from this point.

Mr Man, the reason for the increase in boxoffice revenue is clearly stated in the screenshot you posted!
Go to my profile and see my topic on Nollywood in 2016! I watched all those movies and many more others! Since Nollywood started showing at cinemas, I watched more films in 2016 than any other year! Are you trying to tell me I had more disposable income in 2016 than in previous years?
This stuff is just common sense! Have you checked the progression in boxoffice revenue over the years? It has been on a high rise due to the fact that more quality movies are been produced, cinema culture is gradually catching up with people and the former cinema goers who only stuck to Hollywood movies are gradually opening up to Nollywood movies!

Orikinla1:
Despite a gloomy economy and an uncertain outlook, the Nigerian movie industry has just enjoyed its best year at the box-office with an amazing N1 billion from a record 50 locally-produced titles. After years of predictions, it seems that Nollywood is finally delivering on its promise and putting quality before quantity. As a result, movie-goers have rewarded the industry with a massive increase in cinema ticket sales. The N1 billion bonanza, represents nearly 30 per cent of the N3.5 billion generated from just 28 cinemas across Nigeria, which includes movies from Hollywood and around the world.

https://www.businessdayonline.com/the-wedding-party-defies-recession/

If i was the mod of TV section, I would have banned you from posting there because of this rubbish you are posting here!
You are a disgrace!

idupaul:



It has nothing to do with Buhari...Wedding party came out during the Holidays when a lot of folks had returned from diaspora

It has a lot to do with President Buhati's guaranty of the conducive environment for thousands of Nigerians to have the incomes that paid for the tickets at the cinemas.
And the guaranty of security played a significant part too.

Orikinla1:

It has a lot to do with President Buhati's guaranty of the conducive environment for thousands of Nigerians to have the incomes that paid for the tickets at the cinemas.
And the guaranty of security played a significant part too.

I've always known you are mentally unstable! but I didn't know it was this bad!

This is so daft!

homesteady:


If i was the mod of TV section, I would have banned you from posting there because of this rubbish you are posting here!
You are a disgrace!

Story for the gods.
You are just petty.
You poor knowledge of socioeconomic backgrounds and intellectual ignorance are too apparent.

During the corrupt and incompetent government of former President Goodluck Jonathan, both the Federal Government and State Government were not paying salaries regularly. In fact the Federal Government owed civil servants until the inauguration of President Muhammadu Buhari.
The highest grossing movie was "30 Days in Atlanta" that made about N175m.

President Buhari has addressed the economic sabotage of piracy.

Pres. Buhari Instructs Security Agencies to Crack Down on Nollywood Movie Pirates
https://www.bellanaija.com/2015/07/pres-buhari-instructs-security-agencies-to-crack-down-on-nollywood-movie-pirates/

AVRS boss hails Buhari over plans to tackle piracy - Vanguard News
http://www.vanguardngr.com/2015/07/avrs-boss-hails-buhari-over-plans-to-tackle-piracy/

You don't even under the definition of preference scale in economics.

I have enough lessons for you if you have the IQ.
Read and understand why government economic policies and national security have been significant factors in the booming entertainment industry.

A preference scale in economics is a basic tool that determines the demand of certain products. This scale revolves around the basic needs of humans for a specified product.
https://ask.naij.com/economics/what-is-the-meaning-of-scale-of-preference-in-economics-i23738.html

As a result, Africa now has the fastest-growing middle class in the world. Some 313 million people, 34% of Africa’s population, spend USD 2.20 a day, a 100% rise in less than 20 years, according to the African Development Bank.
The bank’s definition of middle class in Africa is people who spend the equivalent of USD 2 to USD 20 a day — an assessment based on the cost of living for Africa’s near one billion people. It is acknowledged that many living on USD 2 to USD 4 a day could easily slip back into poverty. But even when you take these people out of the equation, the bank puts the stable middle class at 123 million, 13% of the population. By 2060, says the bank, the number of middle-class Africans will grow to 1.1 billion (42% of the predicted population).
The world’s fastest-growing middle class | UHY International
http://www.uhy.com/the-worlds-fastest-growing-middle-class/

"Nigeria's middle class revolution: The 'how' and 'how fast' (1)" - by: Tolu Ogunlesi

These days, I find myself very much interested in matters relating to the Nigerian/African middle class. I'm not alone, journalists and academics and investment bankers and DFIs are all quite obsessed with it as well, if the number of articles and reports daily emerging is anything to go by.

The starting point for a conversation would of course be China, which has managed to convert a high economic growth rate (three decades of 10-per cent-plus growth)into significant economic benefits for tens of millions of citizens. Brazil too; analysts say President Lula's eight-year rule (2002 - 2010) succeeded in lifting almost 30 million Brazilians into the middle class.

Let's move over to Nigeria, and ask a few questions? How many people did President Olusegun Obasanjo's government move into the middle class? What's the current size of the Nigerian middle class (how reliable are the figures: an African Development Bank report estimates, based on 2008 figures, that between 10 and 23 per cent of Nigeria's population is middle class), and exactly how fast is it growing, beyond the vagueness of news headlines.

No doubt, the eighties and nineties existed to decimate the Nigerian middle class. Entrepreneurship and industrialisation struggled and slumped in the face of the Structural Adjustment Programme, government-enforced corruption, and political uncertainty. We still haven't done a good enough job of documenting the scale of the tragic outflow, to Europe, America and the Gulf, of Nigeria's professional classes during that period. Many of those who stayed behind had to helplessly endure falling into a purgatory over which poverty hovered threateningly.

By most accounts, things started to change for the better around the turn of the century, with the return of democracy and the winds of relative freedom and openness - i.e. economic reform - that came with them. The African Development Bank, in 'The Middle of the Pyramid', its report on Africa's Middle Classes (2011), says: 'Nigeria's new middle class has emerged along with the expansion of the private sector in industries such as banking, telecommunications and services, centered in urban areas, particularly Lagos. The purchasing power of the new middle class in Nigerians can be observed at some shopping malls that have recently been opened in the country."

Shoprite, the South African retail chain, came to Nigeria in 2005, and now already has six outlets across the country. Across the country's urban areas, cinemas and restaurants and malls and hotels and entertainment centres are springing up, and we are seeing interesting trends play out. (Recently a Nollywood filmmaker told me Box Office returns from the cinemas at the Ikeja City Mall dwarf those from cinemas on the Island - which says something about the distribution of the middle classes. Generally, we like to assume that the biggest catchment areas for disposable income in Lagos are on the Islands namely - Victoria Island, Ikoyi - and Lekki, but it is starting to seem that the real money may be on the Mainland - which makes perfect sense if one considers that about 70 per cent of the population of Lagos lives on the Mainland).

We can spend all day fascinating swapping stories about the resurgence of the middle class, and the entrepreneurship opportunities that that market presents (the latest glimpses of the potential are to be found in the increasing proliferation of investor-backed e-commerce sites), but for me, what we should be focusing on the most is the How (by what means is this middle class growing) and the How Fast (relative to how fast it needs to be).

Especially considering the predilection of our governments for cheap propaganda. I still chuckle every time I recall President Goodluck Jonathan's panicky speech during the Occupy Nigeria protests in 2012, when he announced that his government was going to create 370,000 new jobs. Just like that, as though the announcement carried the evidence of the accomplishment. For me, it was further evidence of the extent to which Nigeria's leadership likes to treat citizens as though we were all a bunch of fools.

That's also how in 2009 the Yar'Adua government launched a 2009 - 2011 Nigerian Youth Employment Action Plan that was supposed to create a million jobs in its first year alone. Alas not even the NIYEAP itself survived the turmoil that ended the Yar'Adua administration. I'm sure no one in the current government even remembers it once existed. Now, we've moved on to SURE-P employment, and the obligatory propaganda that comes with government lotteries of that nature.

Bottom line is this: We urgently need to answer a fundamental question: How many jobs are being created per unit time in this country? (And by jobs I mean real and sustainable jobs, not amnesty schemes or government-funded youth squads). And in what sectors?

People will be quick to point out the jobs that banking and telecoms and oil and gas and entertainment have supposedly created over the last decade. But there is a problem there - those sectors cannot drive an employment revolution on the scale at which Nigeria requires it. Airtime-vending, CD-hawking and diesel-peddling are not the sort of jobs that we should be boasting about as evidence of a job revolution in Nigeria (and this is not to disparage any of those endeavours).

Speaking at the Metropolitan Club in Lagos in March, the Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, Lamido Sanusi, made a very important point. He was quoted as saying: "How many people are employed in the financial system compared to the number of people employed and the impact you get from the agricultural and manufacturing sectors? Financial services sector cannot be the engine for growth... The banking industry is not set up to create jobs within itself; it is set up to provide capital to people who create jobs. By the time your biggest employers become the banks and the government, you have a problem."

So there, we have some answers: Agriculture and manufacturing. Our magic bullets will very likely be found on our farms and factories. China's technological ambitions, and the zeal with which it pursues them, never fail to stun. Last yea, a Chinese company, Huawei, overtook Sweden's Ericsson for the first time to (briefly) become the world's biggest telecoms-equipment manufacturer (impressive for a company that didn't get its first outside-of-China contract until 1997); while Lenovo overtook HP as the world's leading PC maker. Examples of Chinese stories like those abound.

There are lessons for Nigeria to learn from China, about developmental and entrepreneurial aggression. How does Nigeria expect to defeat poverty or be taken seriously as an economy when we manufacture - in quality or quantity-nothing of international significance, and show no signs of a desperation to remedy that? (Much of the blame for that state of affairs should go to our electricity dysfunction. A country that spends an estimated $10bn annually running generators is not ready for a poverty-smashing, middle class-building revolution).

Two weeks ago, 1.7 million Nigerians sat for the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination for higher institutions in the country. Admission spaces in tertiary institutions exist for only one of every three of them. An unlucky one million are fated to sit for the exam again, next year. Of the relatively lucky 500,000 who will get into school, only a fraction will be guaranteed the regular jobs we all aspire for (civil service, banking, telecoms, oil and gas, etc). Most will have no guarantees of a middle class existence a decade or two from now.

What plans are we making to channel as many of the Dead-Ended Million as we can, away from the blind obsession with impotent paper certificates, towards an alternative route to future (middle class) prosperity?

With the massive 'go-slow'on the roads leading in and out of tertiary education, shouldn't we be more desperate and aggressive in our investing in alternative routes - agriculture and manufacturing - realising that the consequences of half-hearted action will be nothing short of fatal?

QuotaSystem:


First of all, may God forgive you for seeking his judgment upon the innocent, as you have just prematurely done without understanding my perspective.

Brother it's different strokes for different folks. If you examine the situation dispassionately, the fact remains that there remains a significant number of Nigerians with enough disposable income to spend in movie theatres as the sales numbers provided by the OP clearly indicates. It is a fact that cinemas are sold out on "the wedding party" for instance. I even stumbled on a joke yesterday on Instagram where someone was begging those that have been going to see the multiple times to wait till others that have never seen it get a chance. Such is the scramble to spend disposable income by a wide band of Nigerians, which is why I stated that the effects of the recession is most times exaggerated. Take a trip to Play, the Bank, Quilox, Cubana etc any Friday and this fact will become even clearer.

I understand how this might not make sense to you in view of the challenges you are facing as outlined, but numbers can be very stubborn.

Hey dis is d height of it!! You are in a recession because dea is contraction in ur productive arm!! If I want go be unproductive I would be a yahoo boy or a musician and quilox would be my home! Damn, even wif my salary I can club every weekend same way u clubbed when u wea in sch!! The Britons also have clubbers, LA has gamblers same wif China but dey have a productive arm dat Neva rests, dey got researchers and improvers datz y dey are stable. You have zero production in place, u got gboys and artists and students filling ur clubhouses and u say recession is exaggerated? You and ur ilk are one thing dat should NEVER happen to Nigeria. Instead of trying to see how raw materials, food products and transportation can b cheap u are trying to say all is well because ppl can pay 1,500 to watch a movie.. How many 100k per month workers can flex in quilox? Bro, hedonists will find a way whether recession or not, phone lovers will buy phones even if dey would go broke afterwards. Truth is our spending power haz depleted badly and if u want to use club proceeds to judge performance go to these clubs and ask 4 dea net profit in 2014..iranu

This Orikinla1 is a clown! I can't believe you made me to read that long article that proves nothing! I can't quote that rubbish, so I'd address some here.

Before I start, If you think I'm doing all these for the sake of Jonathan/Buhari argument, you should think again!

During the corrupt and incompetent government of former President Goodluck Jonathan, both the Federal Government and State Government were not paying salaries regularly. In fact the Federal Government owed civil servants until the inauguration of President Muhammadu Buhari.

If i can remember well, Jonathan government was even collecting loans to pay salaries! Besides is it not on this same Nairaland that we still see pictures of workers protesting because of salary? All doctors in Kano just went on strike because they had not been paid for 2 months!

The highest grossing movie was "30 Days in Atlanta" that made about N175m.

Let me now ask you, how did Jonathan government make this possible? Did anybody ever give Jonathan any credit for the landmark made by A.Y?

President Buhari has addressed the economic sabotage of piracy.

You must be irrevocably crazy for this rubbish! Is this the first time we are hearing about battle against piracy?


Then the rest things you wrote are rubbish!

It is on record that Nigeria suffered from recession in 2016, Inflation was at an 11 year high, growth rate dropped, unemployment rate increased! So you trying to link the increased boxoffice revenue to the government is a case of gross stupidïty and absolute idiocy!

In one of my earlier posts, I said I watched more Nollywood movies at the cinema this year than in other years, are you trying to tell me that It was Buhari that made it possible?

This stuff is just common sense, but I know common sense is not common! Since when Nollywood movies started screening in cinemas there has been a yearly increase in box office revenue due to
1) The Quality of movies keep on getting better, thereby attracting more people!
2) Cinema culture is spreading!
3) Old cinema goers who only watched Hollywood movies are gradually softening their resistance to watch Nollywood movies! I watched wedding party with about 10 of my friends, they are regular cinema visitors, but they were watching a Nollywood movie for the 1st time!

I think I've written enough!

DecemberIV:


I didn't expect any hereditary cerebral handicap you seemingly have will blur the point being made by the OP that a wide band of Nigerians still have enough disposable income to throw at movie theaters despite the economic contraction, as indicated by the over N1b grossing from box office sales in the last two years, a feat never achieved under the previous administration. A recession is simply an economic term that indicates two consecutive negative growth periods in an economy and nobody has denied that on this thread.

You are congenitally inept to make comparison and intellectually bereft of understanding what's 1bn in comparison to $500bn
14 out of 16 of sub sectors in manufacturing are in recession. 16 out of 18 sub sectors in service industry are in recession.
About 5m lost their jobs last year. About 30 states out of 36 are owing workers and pensioners
It takes less than 140k Nigerians to generate 200m in movie tickets while 5M Nigerians just lost their jobs and another 3m are being owed their salaries.
I know facts don't win in this age of Buharism and Trumpism, CPI, Inflation and Forex are better indicators.
BTW, did u buy a bag of rice at 10k at Buharis Central Market? Let me know when you buy $1@ N299 at CBN open market