Netflix Releases, Nollywood, and Africa's 1,700 Screens

The film opens on a compound at dawn. A woman sets a calabash down at the foot of a tree, straightens, and says nothing. In a rented hall in Aba, in south-eastern Nigeria, somebody in the third row names the tree out loud before the subtitle does, and the room laughs — the recognition kind of laugh, not the mocking kind. The nearest commercial cinema is a long drive away, and a ticket there costs more than most of that room would spend on a film twice.

That gap explains more about African cinema than any opening-weekend chart does. It is also why Netflix releases have become the main event for a certain kind of Nigerian, Ghanaian and Senegalese film — the kind built out of a tradition's own stories — rather than the afterlife of a theatrical run. To see why, it helps to start with one number.

The number: fewer than 1,700 screens

In 2021, UNESCO published The African Film Industry: Trends, Challenges and Opportunities for Growth, the first survey of its kind to try to count the whole continent at once. Among its findings, one number does more work than the rest: Africa had fewer than 1,700 cinema screens.

Not 1,700 cinemas. Screens — the individual auditoriums, the rooms with a projector pointed at a wall. Across 54 countries and, at the time, more than 1.3 billion people. That is roughly one screen for every 750,000 people.

For scale: North America has somewhere around 40,000 screens for a population under 400 million, which is about one screen for every 8,000 people. France, a country of 68 million, has roughly 6,000. The continental ratio is not a little worse. It is off by a factor of ninety.

Set that beside the other number in the same report. Nollywood — Nigeria's film industry — was producing an estimated 2,500 films a year, second in volume only to India. UNESCO put the continent's film and audiovisual sector at around 5 million jobs and about $5 billion in GDP, and estimated it could reach 20 million jobs and $20 billion if the structural obstacles were cleared.

So: one of the most productive film cultures on earth, and almost nowhere to project it.

What the 1,700 actually counted

A number that stark deserves to be read carefully, because what it measured is narrower than it first sounds.

UNESCO was counting formal commercial exhibition — screens inside businesses that sell tickets, report admissions, and can be found by an industry body. That is the only kind of screen a distributor can build a release plan around, and the only kind that produces a box-office figure. It is a real and important thing to count. It is not the same thing as counting where films get watched.

The distribution of those screens matters as much as the total. They are not spread evenly. A large share sit in South Africa, Egypt and Morocco — countries with long-established exhibition chains and the middle-class shopping-mall infrastructure that modern multiplexes attach themselves to. Much of West and Central Africa has very few. Several countries have effectively none at all; a national cinema culture can exist entirely without a national cinema.

Nigeria, the loudest film industry on the continent, has fewer than two hundred commercial screens for more than two hundred million people. Roughly one screen per million Nigerians, and most of them clustered in Lagos and Abuja, inside malls, at ticket prices that sort the audience by income before anyone has chosen a film.

This is the constraint that has quietly shaped what Nigerian cinema greenlights. If your entire domestic theatrical market is a few dozen buildings serving a metropolitan slice of two cities, then the films that survive theatrically are the ones that slice will turn out for in one weekend: comedies, big-star ensembles, weddings, crime. A three-hour Yoruba-language epic about a masquerade lineage is a harder sell in that room — not because Nigerians don't want it, but because the room isn't where those Nigerians are.

That is a measurement artefact hardening into a production decision. And it ran for decades before streaming arrived to interrupt it.

What the number does not measure

Here is where the 1,700 stops being useful, and where anyone reading it as a statement about African audiences goes wrong.

Nollywood did not build itself on cinemas. It built itself, from the early 1990s onward, on videocassettes and then VCDs and DVDs, duplicated and distributed out of markets — Alaba International Market in Lagos above all, and Onitsha, and Aba. A film shot in three weeks could be on a market stall in a month and in a living room in Enugu the same week. None of that passed through a box office. None of it was ever counted.

And the watching happened, and still happens, in rooms nobody surveys:

The screen count measures the width of the formal pipe. It says nothing about the pressure of the water.

There is a second thing it doesn't measure, and on a site about belief it is the more interesting one. A box-office figure tells you how many tickets were sold. It tells you nothing about whether the film got the tradition right — whether the Ifá verse quoted in act two is a real verse, whether the priest on screen is doing something a priest would recognise, whether the people whose story it is were named. No commercial metric has ever been able to see that. Which means the industry conversation about African mythology films is conducted almost entirely in a vocabulary that cannot discuss the mythology.

Why do African mythology films perform better on streaming than in cinemas?

Because the audience for them is spread thin over an enormous area, and theatrical release is a technology for concentrating an audience in one place on one weekend. Streaming is a technology for gathering a scattered one over months. The film hasn't changed; the shape of its audience has finally been matched by the shape of its distribution.

Think about who actually wants a film about the Yoruba concept of a person's chosen destiny, or about Mami Wata as she is understood along the coast from Senegal to Cameroon, or about an Akan chief's succession. Some of them are in Lagos, and can reach a multiplex. Many more are in Ibadan and Abeokuta and Ilorin and Kumasi and Cotonou, in towns whose screen count is zero. A very large number are in the diaspora — the Nigerian household in Peckham, the Ghanaian family in the Bronx, the Congolese community in Brussels — people for whom the film is not entertainment about somewhere else but a message from home. And a real share are outside the tradition entirely: viewers in Nairobi or São Paulo or Seoul who found the film because a platform put it in front of them.

No theatrical release on earth can assemble that group in a weekend. A catalogue can assemble it over a year, and it does, quietly, without anyone announcing it.

This is why the pattern of the last several years has been so consistent: Yoruba-language epics reaching audiences on streaming that no cinema chain in Nigeria could have delivered. Aníkúlápó and Jagun Jagun did numbers on Netflix that would have been structurally impossible theatrically — not because the films were better suited to a small screen, but because the people who wanted them were never all going to be in the same building. Biyi Bandele's Elesin Oba: The King's Horseman, adapted from Wole Soyinka's play about the Ọyọ horseman's duty at the death of an Aláàfin, is a film with a specific, demanding subject and a global audience of exactly the wrong density for a multiplex.

So when a mythology-heavy epic opens soft in cinemas and then finds its people on a platform months later, the honest reading isn't redemption. It's that the theatrical number was measuring the wrong thing from the start. Streaming is where the film was always going to live. The cinema run was the trailer.

Streaming is the right home. It is not a free one.

That argument is easy to over-tell, and the industry press over-tells it constantly. Three things keep it honest.

Data costs money. A streaming audience is a data-paying audience, and mobile data in much of West and Central Africa remains expensive relative to daily income. Streaming has not made films free to watch; it has changed who pays and how. The viewing centre with one connection and forty chairs is not a relic of the DVD era — it is a rational response to bandwidth pricing, and it remains invisible to platform analytics in exactly the way it was invisible to box office.

Catalogues are rented, not owned. A disc bought at Alaba in 2004 is still in someone's house in 2026. A licence expires. Films leave platforms, sometimes with no notice and no legal alternative anywhere. For a documentary about a masquerade tradition or a drama built on an oral story, disappearing from the only place it was available is not a commercial inconvenience — it is the record going dark. The archival case for physical media and for African-owned platforms is not nostalgia.

Commissioning is a policy, and policies change. Netflix's African push was substantial and then, by 2024, visibly narrower; trade press reported the company pulling back on original commissions in Nigeria and South Africa and leaning harder on licensing finished films instead. Its first African original series, Queen Sono, was cancelled after one season back in 2020. Meanwhile Showmax rebuilt itself around African production, Disney+ funded Kizazi Moto and Iwájú out of African studios, and Prime Video's Africa strategy expanded and contracted with the rest of its business. The platforms are not a stable home. They are a set of doors that open and close on decisions made elsewhere.

The films that will last are the ones whose makers treat streaming as one window among several — festival runs, theatrical in the diaspora markets where the density does exist, licensed television, and eventually somebody's archive. C.J. Obasi's Mami Wata took the festival route, picked up a cinematography award at Sundance, and reached its audience through arthouse distribution rather than a platform deal. Blitz Bazawule's The Burial of Kojo went the other way, from a small Ghanaian release to Netflix, and travelled further for it. Neither path is the correct one. The correct one is the one that fits the film's actual audience geometry.

The question underneath the industry question: whose telling got filmed?

Here is what the 1,700 screens, and the streaming figures that succeeded them, are both blind to.

Oral traditions vary. That is not a flaw in them; it is how they work. A story about Ọya among the Yoruba of Ọyọ is not identical to the version told in Ekiti, and neither matches what the same figure became in Candomblé in Bahia or in Lucumí in Cuba. Among the Akan of Ghana, what a stool means and who may sit on it differs by state and by lineage. A griot in the Manding tradition — a jeli, from a family that has carried the histories for centuries — will tell the Sunjata epic with the emphases their line has always used, and another jeli will place them elsewhere. Both are correct. Neither is the canon, because there isn't one.

Film cannot do that. Film has to choose. A production picks one costume for a masquerade, one melody for an invocation, one account of who wronged whom, and prints it. And when that print goes onto a platform with hundreds of millions of subscribers, that single choice acquires a reach no telling in the tradition's history has ever had. A version that belonged to one town becomes, for a global audience with no other reference, the version.

This is not an argument against making the films. It is an argument for making them with the naming intact — for a title card that says which people, which region, whose account, and for a filmmaker willing to say in an interview that other tellings exist. A handful do exactly this, and it costs them nothing.

The better news is what these films have already corrected. A century of missionary-era description taught a global audience to read West African religion through a single distorting lens: shrines as idolatry, Ifá divination as superstition rather than a formal system of interpretation with a corpus of verses and years of training behind it, and Èṣù — the Yoruba òrìṣà of crossroads, messages and the unpredictable turn — flatly mistranslated as the devil in early Yoruba Bible translations, a mistake that has outlived everyone who made it. Hollywood added the rest: the drumming-and-torches shorthand, the zombie, the pin-stuck doll that has nothing to do with Haitian Vodou as it is actually practised. When a Yoruba-language epic shows a babaláwo consulting the Ifá corpus as a professional exercising a difficult skill, it undoes more of that damage in four minutes than an essay does in four thousand words. That is the real cultural return on these films, and no metric on the platform dashboard will ever show it.

Names and terms

A glossary that mixes two vocabularies, because the argument of this piece is that they belong in the same conversation.

• Nollywood — Nigeria's film industry, built from the early 1990s on direct-to-video distribution rather than cinemas; among the world's largest by number of films produced.
• Screen count — the number of individual commercial auditoriums, the industry's basic measure of theatrical capacity.
• Theatrical window — the period a film plays in cinemas before it may appear on other platforms; in Nigeria it is short, and shrinking.
• Viewing centre — a room with a projector or television and a paying audience, common across West Africa; counted by nobody.
• Òrìṣà (oh-REE-shah) — in Yoruba tradition, the divinities through whom the world is engaged; each with their own domain, praise-poetry and devotees.
• Ifá (ee-FAH) — the Yoruba divination system and its body of verses, interpreted by a trained diviner called a babaláwo; a formal discipline requiring years of study.
• Èṣù (EH-shoo) — the òrìṣà of crossroads, messages and reversal, who carries communication between people and divinities. Not the devil, whatever early translations claimed.
• Egúngún (eh-GOON-goon) — Yoruba ancestral masquerade, performed by lineages who hold the right to it, honouring the dead as present participants in community life.
• Mami Wata — a water spirit known across coastal West and Central Africa and in the diaspora, understood variously as a bringer of wealth, a demanding patron, and a figure of the sea's ambiguity.
• Jeli / griot — in Manding societies of Mali, Guinea and Senegal, a hereditary keeper of history, genealogy and epic, trained within the family.
• Sankofa — an Akan symbol and proverb from Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire, showing a bird turning its head backward to take an egg from its own back.

What the number is for

Fewer than 1,700 screens is not a verdict on African audiences. It is a description of one narrow pipe, built for one economic model, in places where malls were built. Read as a verdict, it produces the tired story: cinema struggling on a continent that doesn't turn out. Read correctly — as a measure of formal capacity and nothing else — it explains precisely why streaming was not a consolation prize for African film but the first distribution technology that matched the actual shape of its audience.

What neither number can see is whether the tradition on screen was named to its people, or flattened into a continent-wide blur. That part is still done by hand, by whoever bothers.

The Akan have a phrase for the work of going back for what got left behind: se wo were fi na wosankofa a yenkyi — it is not wrong to return for what you have forgotten.

I keep a notebook column for it. Every time I watch one of these films, I write down whose telling it used: the people, the region, the lineage or the town, if the film says. When the film doesn't say, I write unnamed. I have been keeping the column for a while now, and most of it reads unnamed — which is the one figure in this piece I gathered myself, and the only one I would like to see change.