Nollywood is evolving, and it requires an extensive distribution system that
can handle its sporadic expansion. The informal economic structure that
the comprador bourgeoisie operated for the last fifteen years can no longer
sustain media distribution and film circulation in the industry. Nollywood
films have become global commodities: they are now available anywhere
there is internet in the world, thanks to multinational media corporations.
However, multinational media corporate organizations, while they provide
funding for filmmakers to make their movies, are involved in aesthetic
gerrymandering. They intentionally direct filmmakers to make movies that
target international audiences, and they insert specific cinematic ideas that
reinforce western stereotypes in their movies. Furthermore, they shun
stories that appeal to historical hermeneutics and indigenous agency.
In critical terms, the boundary between the informal economy that has
sustained Nollywood for more than three decades, and the new formal
economy sector that transnational corporatization of the industry
engenders is so thin, if not collapsible. If the local informal marketers
could have access to the vast machinery of production and expansive
distribution networks that the corporate organizations have, they too
would provide transnational coverage for Nollywood films. So, in a way,
multinational corporations are “colonizers or a comprador bourgeoisie,
mediating between global capital and the relatively powerless local
economy” (Haynes, 2018). In production parlance, what is unfolding in the
Nollywood’s economy is a form of aggressive/oppressive capitalism that
hungrily stripes local, but disparate informal market economy players the
power to band together as unified formal market operators. Underneath
the populist framework of the corporate economy is a capitalist sense of
accumulation that threatens the organic growth of the informal Nollywood
economy. The “corporate takeover” is similar to the thieving tactics of
brood parasite birds (such as cuckoo) that hijack the nests of unsuspecting
birds to raise their chicks. In a way, transnational corporations’ operations are “a kind of cultural strip mining, profiteering from a whole film
industry—a cadre of personnel, a star system, a way of working, a style, a
set of genres, an assembled audience—that they did nothing to create”
(Haynes, 2018).
While the economic necessities that undergird capital accumulation and
profit-making by corporate organizations are understood, the model of
operation that most transnational organizations have exhibited so far
indicates market strategies that willingly exclude informal marketers.
Instead of establishing production and distribution systems that can
accommodate the local marketers as proxies and distributors, foreign
corporate organizations introduce innovative business ideas that will
ultimately cripple local investments. They finance original film series and
commission productions that target the African middle class and elites. By
making movies that target the elites, corporate organizations seek to
maximize profit and increase their audience pool. Thus, they deny local
filmmakers the chance to grow their audience-base and improve revenue
generation.