Written by Emmanuel Moronfolu
Nollywood has seen remarkable growth in recent years, rising from an insignificant corner of the global film industry to becoming the largest producer of titles worldwide by volume. After decades of low-budget, low-quality productions, the industry is beginning to take a new shape, with serious investment going into improving the quality of its films. Yet for most Nigerians, the feeling persists that the way we tell our stories hasn’t gotten better. This has pushed many of us toward the conclusion that we need to adopt Western stories to tell great ones, and that thinking is wrong.
Nollywood has great stories. Stories that are universally relatable and genuinely captivating. The problem is not what we are saying. It is our ability to convert those stories into the high-quality screen experiences that great cinema demands.
There is a popular saying in filmmaking: you cannot make a good movie from a bad script. The screenplay is the foundation everything else rests on. A screenplay is a technical document, a blueprint, that contains everything to be seen and heard on screen in a film, series, or television show. It is different from the story itself. A story might explore a young man who, despite his optimism, fails to achieve his dreams because of the socioeconomic realities of his country, with themes of agony, Afro-optimism, love, and hustle running through it. The screenwriter is the person who takes that concept and builds a screen experience out of it, the scenes, the dialogue, the sequences, giving the story a body the camera can follow.
It is only when the screenplay is strong that a director can bring his unique vision and style in to multiply its effect into something extraordinary on screen. But when the foundation is broken, nothing good comes out of it, no matter how gifted the director or how committed the actors.
In Nollywood, the stories we are trying to tell are often right there, vivid and urgent. But the screenplay consistently fails them, stripping the soul out of what the film could have become. Behind the Scenes by Funke Akindele is one clear example. Widely celebrated as a Nollywood blockbuster, backed by a massive production and marketing budget, praised for its performances, and a huge commercial success, its screenplay was still a significant disappointment. The film follows a woman crushed under the weight of family and professional obligations who fakes her own death to reveal who truly cares for her. The themes are rich: family, relationships, black tax, betrayal. But the screenplay undermines all of it by telling the audience what to expect from the very beginning, without earning the emotional payoff through proper character development. Too many scenes were inert, contributing nothing to the story or its themes. Other films that fall into this same category include Gingerrr, The Farmer’s Bride, and nearly the entire catalogue of our YouTube films.
That said, there are exceptions. I have watched Nigerian films with genuinely strong screenplays, like BB Sasore’s Breath of Life, Kemi Adetiba’s To Kill a Monkey, and Far from Home, and these films have earned recognition both locally and internationally, and for good reason.
For Nollywood to truly go global and reach its full potential, we have to move beyond making films with bad scripts and great marketing. The industry’s next step is great scripts and great marketing, because no amount of production value or promotional spend can give you what a strong screenplay gives you for free: a story that actually lands.
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