Biodun Stephen Urges Nollywood Filmmakers to Stop Announcing Cinema Earnings: “We Really Should Do Away With the Announcements”

Nollywood director and producer Biodun Stephen has called on her colleagues across the Nigerian film industry to stop announcing their films’ cinema earnings in public, describing the practice as a distraction that piles unnecessary pressure on fellow filmmakers and narrows what counts as success in the industry.

Stephen made the remarks while speaking on the Paul & Baaj: In Character podcast, in an episode recorded around October 22, 2026. Her comments, first reported by Vanguard, have since stirred a fresh conversation about one of the most divisive habits in modern Nollywood: the weekly ritual of filmmakers taking to social media to declare how many millions their movies made at the box office.

“I think that we really should do away with the announcements,” Stephen said, arguing that the public celebration of cinema figures does more harm than good to the industry’s collective morale.

A Distraction That Puts Pressure on Others

Stephen’s core objection is not with success itself, but with the way broadcasting revenue figures affects everyone else working in the industry. According to the filmmaker, these announcements become a measuring stick that others cannot help but judge themselves against — and often, they fall short through no fault of their own.

“I feel like this is a distractions and it puts pressure on those other people who… feel as if that is the determine and that’s how you determine my success,” she said on the podcast.

The argument is simple but pointed: when one filmmaker posts that their movie pulled in hundreds of millions of naira in its opening weekend, every other producer, director, and writer currently struggling to fund or release a project is left asking themselves whether they have failed. Stephen believes that kind of comparison is unfair, because the numbers alone do not tell the full story of a film or the person who made it.

In an industry where budgets, distribution deals, marketing muscle, and cinema screen allocation vary wildly from one production to another, she suggested, raw earnings figures are a shaky foundation for judging anyone’s talent or relevance.

The Slippers Analogy

To drive her point home, Stephen reached for an analogy rooted in everyday Nigerian business life — the person who starts selling slippers. When one trader is seen succeeding at a venture, she said, others rush to do the same thing simply because they believe slippers sell — without understanding the effort, strategy and resources the first person put in to make it work.

The point, applied to Nollywood, was that the loud public announcement of cinema earnings can trigger copycat filmmaking: colleagues chase whatever formula looks lucrative on a weekly gross chart without grasping the planning and creativity behind the original success. The announcement, in other words, distorts not just how success is judged, but how success is pursued.

It was a characteristically grounded way of framing a debate that has, until now, mostly been argued in abstract industry terms. Stephen brought it back to something every Nigerian understands: markets run on imitation as much as on merit, and public declarations of profit accelerate the imitation cycle.

Have You Even Conquered Nigeria?

Stephen also challenged the ambition that drives many of these announcements — the desire to be seen as a dominant force in the industry. While ambition itself is healthy, she argued, filmmakers should be honest about how far their influence actually extends.

“It’s great to hunger for more, but I always say, have you even conquered Nigeria that can you stand and say that if I go to Kano they know me as an actor?” she said.

The remark cuts at a tension many in Nollywood recognize: the gap between the industry’s social-media image and its real-world reach. A filmmaker can trend on X, rack up millions of Instagram views, and announce nine-figure box office totals — and still be a stranger to millions of Nigerians outside Lagos and Abuja.

Stephen’s question was meant as a reality check. Before filmmakers use earnings announcements to claim national dominance, she suggested, they should ask whether their name and their work are genuinely known in places like Kano — a city with one of the largest film-going populations in the country, and a market Nollywood has historically struggled to win over.

Box Office Is Not the Full Measure of a Film

Perhaps the most substantive part of Stephen’s argument was her insistence that a film’s earnings say nothing definitive about its quality, its lifespan, or its ability to travel beyond Nigeria’s borders.

A movie can rake in impressive cinema revenue, she noted, and still be a poor film in artistic terms — while another picture, carefully made and built with export potential, might earn far less at the domestic box office but go on to find international audiences, festival recognition, or a long afterlife on streaming platforms.

This distinction matters enormously in the current Nollywood economy. Box office announcements measure a single window — the theatrical run — and say nothing about how a film performs on Netflix, Prime Video, or other platforms where Nigerian content increasingly finds its biggest audiences. A film that underperformed in cinemas but became a streaming hit may, in the long run, be the more valuable asset. Yet the announcement culture reduces all of that to a single number posted on a weekend.

Stephen argued, in effect, that the industry should broaden its definition of success to include craftsmanship, longevity, and international potential — qualities no opening-weekend figure can capture.

Who Is Biodun Stephen?

For readers less familiar with her work, Biodun Stephen is one of Nollywood’s most consistent and commercially successful female filmmakers, known for a slate of crowd-pleasing yet carefully made films. She directed Sista (2022), the emotional family drama that became one of her most talked-about works, as well as Breaded Life (2021), Big Love (2023), and Finding Me — films that have earned her a reputation for blending strong storytelling with wide audience appeal.

Before establishing herself as a director and producer, Stephen worked as an actress and a television personality, giving her a rare multi-angle view of the industry. Her perspective carries particular weight precisely because she is not an outsider criticizing from the margins — she is an insider who understands the commercial pressures, because she lives them herself.

That is what makes her comments difficult to dismiss as sour grapes. Stephen’s films have themselves performed well at the box office; her call to end the announcements is not the complaint of someone who cannot compete, but the counsel of someone who has competed and found the ritual hollow.

Nollywood’s Box Office Announcement Culture

To understand why her remarks have landed with such force, it helps to know the culture she is criticizing. Over the past several years, public box office announcements have become a defining feature of Nollywood’s cinema era. Producers routinely take to Instagram and X to declare weekly earnings, post celebratory graphics of milestone figures, and position their films as record-breakers.

The practice has its defenders. Supporters say the announcements build excitement around cinema-going, give producers marketing leverage, and demonstrate to investors and the public that Nigerian films can be serious commercial propositions. In an industry still fighting for corporate confidence, visible numbers are a kind of proof of life.

But critics — and Stephen is now the most prominent voice among them — say the culture has curdled into something less healthy: a weekly scoreboard that rewards hype over craft, pressures smaller filmmakers into silence about modest returns, and turns colleagues into rivals. The numbers are often released without independent verification, since Nigeria has no widely trusted, centralized box office tracking body — a fact that has itself fueled skepticism about some of the figures being announced.

Stephen’s intervention gives that quiet skepticism a public face. She is not saying filmmakers should not succeed, or that earnings do not matter. She is saying the industry should stop treating the announcement of earnings as a measure of professional worth.

Reactions Pour In

Stephen’s remarks are the kind that split opinion, and the debate they have restarted was a long time coming. On one side are those who say out loud what several filmmakers have only whispered privately — that the weekly numbers game has become toxic and exclusionary. On the other are industry hands who argue that transparency about earnings helps attract sponsors, convince cinemas to give Nollywood films more screens, and celebrate local cinema at a time when Hollywood releases dominate many multiplexes.

Both sides may have a point, and Stephen herself left room for that nuance. Her objection was never to filmmakers making money or to the fact of success — it was to the compulsive public announcement of it, and to the way those announcements quietly rewrite who counts as a winner. Whether Nollywood listens, the debate she has restarted is one the industry has been postponing for years.

What Happens Next

Whether her colleagues will take the advice remains to be seen. The box office announcement is deeply embedded in Nollywood’s current commercial machinery, and marketing teams are unlikely to give up a tool that demonstrably drives audience curiosity.

But Stephen’s comments have already succeeded in one respect: they have reframed a habit many took for granted as a choice — and a choice with consequences. Every announcement that goes out now goes out in the context of her argument that it distracts, that it pressures, and that it reduces a complex art to a single number.

For an industry at a crossroads — balancing cinema revenue, streaming ambitions, and international credibility — that may be exactly the conversation Nollywood needs to have.

Source: Vanguard, P.M. News, Legit.ng