Netflix prices are going up in Nigeria. Starting today, the premium plan with 4K + HDR and downloads on six devices jumps to ₦5000. The standard plan also sees a bump, going from ₦3600 to ₦4000. While the basic plan stays put at ₦2,900, the price for the mobile plan has also been increased.
Since October last year, Netflix has been revising its subscription prices globally. The streaming platform also ended its free plan in Kenya which ran for two years.
"As we invest in and improve Netflix, we’ll occasionally ask our members to pay a little extra to reflect those improvements, which in turn helps drive the positive flywheel of additional investment to further improve and grow our service," the company said.
Since 2016, Netflix says it has invested about $175 million in film content production in sub-Saharan Africa, creating over 10,000 jobs within this period. Netflix holds the number two spot among streaming platforms in Africa, with an estimated 1.8 million subscribers by the end of November 2023; that's about 33.5% of the market share.
It is one of the most anticipated Nollywood films of all time and the trailer for King Of Boys: The Return Of The King was released Monday amid frenzy from fans of the crime and political thriller, who call themselves the KOB Army.
The seven-part project is Netflix's first Original Series from Nigeria and a sequel to the highly acclaimed 2018 King of Boys movie directed by leading director Kemi Adetiba.
Fans can now take a peek at what to expect, as formidable businesswoman Eniola Salami, played by Nollywood veteran Sola Sobowale, returns to Nigeria after a five-year exile eager to mete out blood-curdling punishments to her adversaries.
Following the success of the first installation, which made over N450 million ($1M) at the box office, Adetiba announced a sequel was in the works.
After a two-year wait, she revealed that the sequel initially intended to be a movie will be a Netflix Original limited series.
The KOB Army
The KOB Army has shown immense support for the franchise since the first movie, with fans making plans for viewing parties and special outfits when it premieres on August 27 on Netflix.
As the release day for the sequel draws nearer, the anticipation runs high as many wait with bated breath to see The Return Of The King. But fans are not the only ones eager; Adetiba describes the weight of the expectation as "awaiting a report card for the last year and a half of my life."
"My anxiety these days ranges from numb to severe...so I too am on tenterhooks, she says. "But I'm mostly absolutely thrilled by the love and support of the KOB ARMY. It's been so overwhelming. The massive anticipation simply shows us how well-loved KOB 1 is."
The King of Boys has been a stand-out movie for modern Nollywood. It was the sophomore film by Adetiba, whose directorial debut, The Wedding Party, was the unopposed Nollywood movie of the year 2016, being the highest-grossing film until January 2021 and spotlighting Adetiba, who already made her mark in the music and television industry, as a filmmaker of note.
The new installment will see old characters from the original, including actor Toni Tones, who reprises her role as a young Eniola Salami and musician Reminisce as Makanaki.
It also introduces new characters who have a bone to pick with Salami. Among them are seasoned actors Nse Ikpe-Etim and Nollywood heartthrob Richard Mofe Damijo.
King of Boys is a departure from the cheery, bright romcom of The Wedding Party into the dark crime-filled world of Eniola Salami, whose quest for power leaves a trail of dead bodies in her wake. It was a wager which paid off in an industry known of late for primarily producing comedies to meet the audience's demand. Of the top 10 highest-grossing Nollywood movies, King of Boys is the sole thriller on the list.
Trusting the audience
Adetiba says the successful outing taught her not to cage her audience.
"I remember once in film school, an instructor said, 'If you treat your audience as if they were intelligent, they'll love you for it,'" she says.
"Yes, I was told that the audience wasn't ready for a film like KOB." Still, Adetiba and her brother, Remi Adetiba, who co-produces the franchise, persisted in bringing the project to light.
"Running on blind faith, we were all, "Go Big Or Go Home." It was our very own 'Do It Afraid' moment, but we jumped in the deep end, and our amazing audience, aka KOB ARMY, thanked us with their massive support. Just as my instructor said."
Not only was the genre a deviation from the norm in modern Nollywood, but her lead figure was complex in a way that is rarely done in the industry, where characters are usually portrayed as either good or evil.
Adetiba says it was vital for her to highlight this complexity because it mirrors real life. "I love my characters to be relatable...There are many facets to you and I. Understanding this then creating a character that is one-dimensional is an injustice."
"So when I'm creating a character like Eniola Salami ... I'm interested in who s(he) is to all those different people. In Eniola's life, we have her family, those she encounters in everyday life, her legit business customers, then her interactions... in the 'underworld.'"
Adetiba says the production has been a real labor of love and promises a great time. "We threw everything into this production... including the kitchen sink. We gave everything we had, so it's a product of REAL love, blood, sweat and tears. Most important of all, it's a great story."
Three Nigerians have been selected among the twelve (12) African candidates chosen to participate in the 3-month Netflix Episodic Lab (EPL) and Development Executive Traineeship (DET) launched by the Realness Institute.
2 Nigerians were selected to participate in the Episodic Lab where they will develop their story concepts alongside expert story consultants and creative producers. They are Ayoade Adeyanju with Agent 419 and Kehinde Joseph with Osupa.
Other participants include Andile Ngcizela with Drummies (South Africa); Dominique Jossie with Fafi (South Africa); Kudakwashe Maradzika with Bad Influencer (Zimbabwe/South Africa) and Mary Waireri with Sheitain (Kenya/United Kingdom).
Netflix’s Episodic Lab and Development Executive Traineeship are part of efforts by the global streaming giant and the Realness Institute to produce more original local content from creative writers in Africa.
For the DET, Ololade Okedare is the only Nigerian selected to participate in the program where they will accompany the incubation of the six potential Netflix African Original Series.
Anneke Villet, Antionette Engel and Thandeka Zwane (South Africa), Damaris Irungu Ochieng’ (Kenya) and Lara Sousa (Mozambique) make up the other five DET participants.
The Episodic Lab will take place remotely till 5 September 2021, where selected participants will receive about $2,000 monthly stipend so that they can focus entirely on their development. At the end of the lab, each writer will have an opportunity to pitch their incubated concept to Netflix to have their series further developed for production.
Meet the Nigerian writers taking part in the Netflix Episodic Lab.
Ayoade Adeyanju
Ayoade has aggregated over 10 years of career experience creating content spanning various local and international TV shows, including MNet’s Tinsel and EbonyLife’s Ojo’s in ‘d House. He created African Magic’s Hustle and was the story editor for African Magic’s Battleground. He developed content for the critically acclaimed, award-winning show, MTV Shuga.
Kehinde Joseph
Kehinde Joseph has worked for 9 years as a radio presenter on Eko FM in Lagos. He’s the sole Nollywood screenwriter with 3 movies that’s grossed over 100 million at the box office.
When the Nigerian Official Selection Committee sat down to select Nigeria’s nominee for the 2021 Academy Awards last December, the jury voted overwhelmingly for Desmond Ovbiagele’s film The Milkmaid over the sex-trafficking drama Oloture and film festival toast Eyimofe.
Unlike Genevieve Nnaji’s Lionheart which the Academy disqualified from the international feature film category last year for having English as the main language of the script, The Milkmaid fulfils the requirement for a predominantly non-English dialogue track. It conveys authenticity with Hausa, Fulfulde and Arabic, three languages hermetically spoken throughout the film.
The film follows the story of two sisters, Aisha (Anthonieta Kalunta) and Zainab (Maryam Booth), who get separated when insurgents attack their village. Aisha is determined to rescue Zainab from her captors and traces her whereabouts to an enemy camp, where she is enslaved and treated inhumanely.
A sophomore feature from Ovbiagele after his 2014 crime thriller debut Return to Caesar, The Milkmaid is a compellingly superior entry into Nollywood’s Boko Haram-themed cinema.
The genre is relatively new, inspired by the Boko Haram insurgency in Northern Nigeria, which began its deadly uprising in 2009 and has claimed the lives of more than 37,000 people and displaced 2.5 million. Most of these films are not made to be box office hits as they usually employ largely unknown actors, so they sail under the radar.
But with Joel Kachi Benson’s Daughters of Chibok winning a Golden Lion at the 2019 Venice Film Festival and Netflix picking up Adekunle Adejuyigbe’s The Delivery Boy a year later, the genre is slowly occupying an expanding space in the public imagination and has set off some conversations about violence in society.
Tackling such sensitive issues as religious extremism and violence, The Milkmaid has predictably faced censorship at home. The Nigerian Film and Video Censors Board (NFVCB), the government agency whose mandate is to regulate the creation, distribution and exhibition of films and video products by rating them, denied the film classification because it felt it portrayed Islam as an enabler of religious extremism.
To obtain a classification for pubic screening in Nigeria, 24-minutes-worth of footage was cut from the director’s original version. “We had to remove everything – costume, dialogue, language that was an authentic depiction of a particular religion, even though there is nothing in the film that states that the religion was directly responsible for violence,” Ovbiagele said in a December 2020 interview.
The Milkmaid’s censorship was to be expected, considering the NFVCB’s history of stifling artistic freedom and paranoia that films can threaten national unity. The film does not suggest Islam inspires extremism and it also does not glorify terrorists and whatever their motivations are. Rather it exhumes the traumatic experiences of women and girls in a world blighted by insurgency. Although the film is yet to do a wide release, the response from the members of the Muslim community who have seen it at private viewings has been positive.
Because of censorship at home, The Milkmaid turned to Cameroon and Zimbabwe for its theatrical release in November, then went on a limited run with its toned-down cut in select Nigerian cinemas in afterwards. Garnering local buzz, the motion picture swept last year’s Africa Movie Academy Awards with eight nominations and four awards, including Best Film.
For the Oscars, Ovbiagele sent the film’s original version, which contains all the elements of a potential winner: a compelling story, captivating actors’ performance and masterful cinematography.
Through Ovbiagele’s deft handling of the camera, audiences can see how beauty tightly intertwines with violence, creating a stunning artistic patchwork. This visual language is defined by the crisp cinematography of Yinka Edwards whose technical detailing does not just dwell on scenery but also within interpersonal spaces.
At the core of that is a feminine reckoning with extremism and its fallouts – the abduction of women and girls, violence and enslavement.
There is something particularly auspicious about The Milkmaid’s Oscar campaign footprint. But will it appeal to the Academy?
Aside from its obvious artistic merit, the Oscar fate of The Milkmaid will be determined by how the Academy voters – representing the American audience – see anti-terrorism messaging almost 20 years after the start of the US “war on terror”.
Like Nollywood, Hollywood too has experienced a boom in the production of films inspired by the themes of extremism and insurgency. A few have even made it to the Oscars and won.
The genre has successfully propelled the US government narrative of its forces fighting foreign terrorism and restoring stability to faraway conflict-torn regions and has done little to illuminate the disastrous consequences of US anti-terror-driven imperialism.
Although it does not tackle the international aspect of the Boko Haram insurgency, The Milkmaid fits well into this mainstream US narrative about terrorism. Its story would feed into the American viewers’ self-righteous disdain for overseas terrorist groups and will probably be well received. Whether this is what the Academy will be looking for in this year’s international film feature category remains to be seen.
Set in the shady underworld of Lagos brothels, Nigerian thriller Òlòtūré gives viewers an inside look at the sex trafficking schemes that ensnare thousands of Nigerian women each year.
The film is fictional but aims for a realistic and gritty picture to raise awareness of what is a persistent and little-discussed problem, said 36-year-old director Kenneth Gyang.
For decades, scores of Nigerian women and girls have been lured to Europe with promises of work, then trapped in debt bondage and forced to sell sex.
The United Nations migration agency estimates that 80% of Nigerian women arriving in Italy - more than 11,000 in 2016 - are potential victims of sex trafficking.
“I know people are not always receptive to documentaries, so sometimes you have to put these things in fiction so that people will see it,” said Gyang, who won international acclaim for his first film, Confusion Na Wa, in 2013.
His thriller debuted on Netflix this month and quickly became the streaming service’s most-watched film in Nigeria, reaching the top-10 list in another 13 countries.
“For me it’s about people watching the film and then trying to push for policies that will protect these young women from getting trafficked,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
In the movie, a journalist goes undercover as a sex worker to expose human trafficking and quickly gets in over her head.
It is worlds away from the films that are usually popular in Nollywood, Nigeria’s massive film industry, which favours comedies and light-hearted tales about rich people, said Gyang.
“The producers were not sure how it was going to be received,” he said.
“When the film came out, it was #1 on Netflix in Nigeria and on social media, everybody was talking about it. People were angry. People were talking about the fact that they didn’t know this is what happens when people get trafficked.”
In one scene, sex workers undergo a religious ritual that binds them to their traffickers with black magic - a common practice that renders women too fearful to mount an escape.
Gyang said he sought support from NAPTIP, Nigeria’s anti-trafficking agency, to make sure he got the details right.
Part of his motivation, he said, was seeing Nigerian women on street corners when he travelled in Europe.
Foreign donors have poured money into anti-trafficking programmes in the traditional industry hotspot, Edo State, but experts say sex traffickers are now moving to other parts of Nigeria to avoid detection.
"I hope what will happen is that the right people in the right places will see the film, and then the relevant bodies will push for policies to try to help these young women," said Gyang. (Reporting by Nellie Peyton, editing by Lyndsay Griffiths; Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers the lives of people around the world who struggle to live freely or fairly. Visit news.trust.org)
Netflix prices are going up in Nigeria. Starting today, the premium plan with 4K + HDR and downloads on six devices jumps to ₦5000. The standard plan also sees a bump, going from ₦3600 to ₦4000. While the basic plan stays put at ₦2,900, the price for the mobile plan has also been increased.
