Who is Nollywood fooling?
2am (I think). Friday 16 November 2007. Silverbird TV. Legends of Nollywood with Paul Obazele.
I worked through the night to get a demo of a website ready for the morning, the programme came on and I decided to invest 30 minutes into educating myself (yeah right!). Paul featured the director/producerof “Two Good Friends” featuring Mr Ibu. Blah, blah, blah. The part that got my attention was the point when he mentioned (I’ll try to quote that part)
- Q: is it true that your movie sold 70,000 copies
- A: a movie selling 70,000 is not considered a success.
- Q: so would you consider this movie a success?
- A: this movie sold over a 100,000 copies and i would consider it successful. we initially printed 20,000 copies for the first part, another 20,000 for the second part. later due to demand, we printed another 5,000 copies for each and later another 5,000 each. in all, we printed well over a 100,000 copies.
– imagine that. If a producer needs to consider part 1 and 2 of a movie released at the same time as counting to the sales of the movie, who are we fooling. IMHO, if a movie was released as part 1 and 2 simultaneously, isn’t it logical to slash the “presumed” sales figure by 2 to get the “actual” sales figure.
By his calculation, he indicated roughly a 100,000 sales figure. His figure. My figure, the guy sold less than 50,000 (don’t forget some copies will be given out for free).
This is the same mentality that other producers and directors have in calculating their sales figures.
Imagine the actual figure of a movie releasing parts 1 to 3 at the same time. Nollywood, truly Naija.
The ramblings of a programmer and web application developer. A thug and a gentleman. My life force in words "think with a head, love with a heart and hate with a passion"