Omowunmi Dada Says Stop Comparing Nollywood To Hollywood

Entertainment

Lagos · Friday 11 September 2026

Omowunmi Dada has urged Nigerians to show Nollywood more grace, arguing that comparisons with Hollywood overlook the local industry's history and the conditions it works under.

film camera crew set lighting Photograph by Brands&People via Unsplash.

The comparison is genuinely unfair

	Hollywood	Nollywood
Typical budget	Tens of millions of dollars	A tiny fraction of that
Shoot length	Months	Often two to four weeks
Crew	Hundreds, unionised	Dozens, largely freelance
Power on set	Assumed	Generators, budgeted for
Age of the industry	Over a century	A few decades at scale

Judging the two by the same standard is a category error.

What Nollywood did that Hollywood never had to. It built an industry without studio financing, without a functioning cinema circuit for most of its life, and without state support, reaching an audience across the continent on formats the West had already abandoned.

The other side of the argument

Audiences do not grade on a curve, and they should not have to. A Nigerian paying for a cinema ticket or a subscription is choosing between a Nigerian film and everything else available, and "given the constraints" is not a defence that survives contact with a viewer's Friday evening.

Context explains why a film is what it is. It does not make it good, and audiences only pay for the second thing.

Where both things are true at once

The comparison is unfair and it has also been useful. Nigerian production values have risen sharply in the streaming era precisely because audiences who watch international material started expecting more. Pressure that feels ungenerous from inside an industry is frequently what improves it.

The structural point she is gesturing at

What holds Nollywood back is not talent or effort. It is financing, distribution and the absence of a royalty system, which is the same gap Omotola Jalade-Ekeinde described this month when she said thirty years produced none. An industry where the work stops paying the moment it is delivered cannot invest in the next thing.

Grace is a reasonable ask. A participation clause in a standard contract would do more.

Reporting: Legit News and published interviews.

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