Disney announced to fans worldwide on March 12, that it had pushed the theatre release for ‘Mulan’ due to growing coronavirus concerns.
It is easy to see why Disney would refuse to risk the earning potential of the film as more people are resorting to isolation in order to contain the virus.
Disney spent 200 million dollars to produce ‘Mulan’, a large sum of money that does not include marketing fees. Given how familiar the animated version is to global audiences, the new version of ‘Mulan’ was made to resonate with moviegoers around the world.
More films have followed suit. In fact, the first movie to deliver similar heart-breaking news to fans was the James Bond movie, ‘No Time To Die’. In the last couple of days, films like ‘The New Mutants’, ‘Fast and Furious 9’, ‘Sonic The Hedgehog’, ‘A Quiet Place 2’ and ‘Peter Rabbit 2’ have pushed back release dates.
This move makes sense as theatres have shut down in some parts of the world, with growing concerns in North America. The situation is not the same in Africa, particularly Nigeria. On March 13, Nigeria’s health minister, Osagie Ehanire, announced that the second coronavirus case had tested negative.
This means the global hysteria around the virus is at the minimal in the country. With all these films pulling out, what does the cinema audience have to watch and how can Nollywood take advantage of it?
Usually, the months of March through May are a flurry of big budget films selling across markets and earning heavy returns in most cases. The audience is presented with carefully curated options and left to spend accordingly. Nollywood is commonly lost in this period as they do not hold enough leverage.
In 2019, ‘Avengers: Endgame’, ‘Shazam’, ‘Captain Marvel’, ‘What Men Want’, ‘Fast and Furious’ and ‘Aladdin’ premiered within the three months window and made a bulk of the cinema share for the Nigerian market.
‘Avengers: Endgame’ made over 528 million naira with over 320, 000 admissions, ‘Shazam’ had 104, 037 admissions and made almost 130 million naira, ‘Captain Marvel’ pulled in 238 million naira with 169, 000 admissions and ‘What Men Want’ got 130 million with 118, 000 admissions.
Also, ‘Fast and Furious 8’ had 280 million naira gross and 207, 000 admissions while ‘Aladdin’ made 194 million naira with 152, 000 admissions. Generally, the combined earnings of the three months summed up to over 1.6 billion naira.
This is the usual earning power of these months, a market of 1.2 million admissions that has now fallen straight onto the laps of Nollywood. There is no competition, just the interesting cleared path that the industry creates in December.
While a virus of this magnitude was not pre-empted and thus, the industry did not commission enough films in advance, it is easy to see how the poor rate of making competitive films has come to haunt the industry.
A popular quote says, “Let opportunity meet preparedness”. Here, there is an opportunity but the industry had not flexed muscles enough at this time to prepare for it. They had simply surrendered this money-spinning window to the foreign market and thus have no power over it at this point.
As a pseudo-response to the shift of the Bond movie, Toyin Abraham moved the release date of her film, ‘Fate of Alakada’ forward. She dubbed the campaign, ‘No Time to Dull’, a funny take on the Bond title, ‘No Time to Die’. How well will this strategy play out?
Reactions to lack of preferred choice by the audience is normal. They test the waters by watching one or two available films and when they feel repulsed by it, they push back and wait for better.
In the case of ‘Alakada’, Abraham has identified an audience that finds some solace in the name behind the project and has grown to tolerate her franchise. In 2017, the second movie, ‘Alakada Reloaded’ made 70 million naira.
The movie is currently available to watch on Netflix and with the rate at which Nollywood films jump straight from cinema to streaming platforms, would the audience just decide to wait?
Certainly, the film would make some money but so far, it has lacked the marketing and the audience connection that the films generally consumed in this period have. Nollywood has allowed its home audience develop a solid appetite for foreign films between March and May such that reengineering their minds requires more than minimal efforts.
‘Fate of Alakada’ is not ‘Fate of the Furious’ or ‘Mulan’ (or its 2019 brother, ‘Aladdin’). Still, ‘Alakada’ is the better positioned of the three Nollywood films slated for release this period. The others are ‘Rise of the Saints’ and ‘Ratnik’.
Both have interesting premises and far more soul than ‘Alakada’. The former is the modern take on what would have happened to Queen Moremi’s son, while the latter is a sci-fi film eager to fill that gap in the industry.
Audiences have heard of ‘Alakada’, at least from the dozen posts the battalion of influencer cast have put on their social media pages. On the other hand, audiences have to seek out the last two on their own as little or nothing is being done. It is as though they have relied solely on pro-bono marketing.
These films will be joining ‘Who’s the Boss’ and ‘Sugar Rush’ (which now has a more legitimate reason for remaining in the cinema), yet it seems the cinema chains are doing nothing to let the audience know that whilst their Hollywood favourites would be unavailable, there are films they can spend their time watching.
Again, stakeholders have chosen to gamble with the audience hoping that when they stroll into the cinema, they would just pick the Nigerian options with no push back. They forget that nothing shown in the cinema will be novel from the retinue of Nigerian film audiences can stream. Maybe they will, maybe they will not.
