There is a growing tension in Nollywood that has nothing to do with talent and everything to do with survival. It is the quiet exhaustion that comes from an industry where making a good film is no longer enough, where storytelling alone does not guarantee visibility, and where promotion has expanded from a campaign into a full-time performance. This tension has been building for years, largely unaddressed, until a recent public disagreement forced it into the open. The disagreement itself is secondary. What matters is what it revealed.
At its core, Nollywood is grappling with a question many creative industries eventually face: how much of the burden of success should rest on the individual creator? In Nigeria’s film industry, that burden has become unusually heavy. Filmmakers are not only expected to write, direct, produce, and sometimes star in their projects; they are now expected to sell them personally, loudly, and relentlessly. Visibility has become inseparable from labour. The film does not simply exist; it must be pushed, animated, danced, joked, styled, posted, reposted, explained, defended, and constantly kept alive online.
This would not be unusual if the industry had strong institutional support structures. But Nollywood does not yet have the kind of distribution, studio backing, or marketing infrastructure that can absorb this responsibility. As a result, promotion has collapsed inward. The filmmaker becomes the engine. When that engine stalls, the film often disappears.
What this creates is an uneven playing field. Those with the resources, temperament, and brand equity to sustain high-visibility promotion thrive. Those without them struggle, regardless of the quality of their work. Over time, one model of success begins to look like the only model, and any discomfort with it is read as resistance to progress rather than a critique of imbalance.
This is where the conversation often breaks down. Marketing itself is not the problem. Audiences need to be courted; attention must be earned. The problem is how narrow the acceptable form of marketing has become. In today’s Nollywood, promotion is increasingly conflated with performance. To be seen is to be constantly present. To be relevant is to be entertaining even outside the work. For some creators, this is energising. For others, it is draining not because they lack creativity, but because they did not enter filmmaking to become perpetual content.
The industry has been slow to acknowledge this fatigue, partly because success stories tend to silence criticism. When a system produces visible winners, questioning that system can sound like sour grapes. But that framing is lazy. Sustainability is not about whether a few people can endure a model; it is about whether many can thrive within it.
This is why recent public comments by Kunle Afolayan and the equally public response by Funke Akindele struck such a nerve. Not because of personal offence, but because they embodied two truths Nollywood is struggling to reconcile. One truth is that the current promotional climate can be exhausting and creatively intrusive. The other is that mastering that climate has become a legitimate, even necessary, pathway to commercial success.
Funke Akindele’s achievements are not incidental. They are the result of an intimate understanding of audience psychology, popular culture, timing, and visibility. Her approach demonstrates what is possible when marketing is treated as seriously as filmmaking itself. But her success should be read as proof of how much effort is required, not as a universal template everyone must follow. An industry that can only reward one style of engagement is an industry that risks narrowing its creative future.
The mistake Nollywood keeps making is personalising what is fundamentally a structural issue. When filmmakers express discomfort with the current system, the response is often dismissive: adapt or be left behind. But adaptation without support leads to burnout. It also leads to homogenisation the slow erosion of diverse voices in favour of those best suited to perform visibility.
In more mature film ecosystems, promotion is distributed across a network. Studios invest in campaigns. Distributors manage reach. Publicists shape narratives. Critics, festivals, and media create secondary momentum. In Nollywood, much of this scaffolding is either weak or inconsistent. Cinema economics remain opaque. Distribution still feels precarious. Marketing budgets are often personal gambles. In such an environment, it is unsurprising that filmmakers cling to whatever tools seem to work — even if those tools demand constant personal exposure.
Social media, meanwhile, amplifies everything. Nuance does not travel well online. Structural critique becomes perceived shade. Defensive clarification becomes arrogance. The conversation collapses into sides and slogans. And so the real issue — how to build an industry that does not exhaust its creators — is lost in personality-driven noise.
If Nollywood wants to mature, it must stop treating these moments as isolated misunderstandings and start reading them as symptoms. The industry does not need fewer promotional strategies; it needs more options. It needs space for films that travel through festivals rather than trends, for stories that grow through word of mouth rather than virality, for creators who engage audiences without turning themselves into perpetual spectacles.
This requires investment not just financial, but intellectual. It requires serious film marketing agencies, clearer exhibitor relationships, transparent performance metrics, and a willingness to separate a film’s success from its creator’s online stamina. Most importantly, it requires the industry to stop equating visibility with worth.
The real question Nollywood must answer is not whether filmmakers should dance or not dance, post or not post, entertain or not entertain. The question is whether the industry can build a future where success is not conditional on exhaustion. Until that happens, these debates will keep resurfacing, not because filmmakers enjoy conflict, but because the system keeps asking them to give more of themselves than it can sustain.
What we are witnessing is not an argument about marketing styles. It is an industry negotiating its growing pains in public. And whether Nollywood listens to the substance of that negotiation rather than the noise around it will shape what kind of creative ecosystem it becomes next.
