Mildred Okwo and Canal+ Just Showed Us Who Really Decides Nollywood’s Biggest Night

Filmmaker Mildred Okwo wrote on X on Monday that she expects this year’s AMVCA to be the last one. In a follow-up post, she said owners chasing quick returns wouldn’t keep bankrolling expensive shows that took years to pay back. The new owners are Canal+, the French conglomerate that took control of MultiChoice in September 2025. The same group already shut Showmax on April 30 after writing it off as a money loser. Nigerian X spent the next two days pulling that thread, and the conversation has stretched from filmmaker timelines into entertainment journalism roundups.

What Does One Tweet from a Working Filmmaker Actually Do for Nollywood?

It changes who’s allowed to ask the question out loud. Okwo is a peer of the people who will be on the red carpet. She has directed AMVCA-nominated work, sat on the Nigerian Oscar Selection Committee, and produced one of 2012’s biggest Nollywood box-office releases. When she names the dependency on her timeline, the conversation moves from the business pages to the green room. The 12th AMVCA, hosted on May 9 by Bovi and Nomzamo Mbatha, runs 32 categories and a sponsor stack led by Don Julio. All of that prestige now sits inside a Canal+ line item, and the death of an entire eleven-year-old streaming brand tells producers exactly how those line items get treated when the math turns sour.

What We Think

The pattern is what matters here. Nollywood keeps getting the global attention, the streams, the Lagos-to-London flights, and the headline collaborations. The infrastructure that decides which films count as hits and which actors count as tier-one stars keeps drifting further from Lagos. Burna Boy’s early catalogue is stuck in court over a sale his foreign distributor hasn’t acknowledged. Showmax is gone. The AMVCA is now an African ceremony running on a French scoreboard. One filmmaker did in one tweet what conferences and policy panels haven’t managed in a year, which is to name the asymmetry plainly enough that nobody can talk around it the next time the cameras come on.

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