The World Is Going Back to the Cinema. Africa Is Just Getting Started.

Globally, cinema is recovering. The 2025 worldwide box office closed at $33.55 billion, and analysts at Gower Street are forecasting $35 billion for 2026, the strongest year since before the pandemic. Audiences are returning to screens in the US, Europe, and parts of Asia. Studios are extending theatrical windows again. The question has moved from whether cinema can survive to whether the industry can hold the momentum.

Africa’s situation doesn’t map cleanly onto that story. The continent had a record year in 2025, but the numbers underneath the headline are more complicated than a simple recovery.

Nigeria’s cinema industry posted a total box office gross of ₦15.6 billion last year, up nearly 35% from 2024. For the first time in the region’s recorded history, Nollywood films captured a larger market share than Hollywood, 49.4% versus 48.8%, across 122 cinemas in Anglophone West Africa. An audience that absorbed a 37% rise in average ticket prices over a single year and still turned up in numbers is telling you something about appetite. It’s also telling you something about how much the market could grow if the physical infrastructure caught up with demand.

Nile Entertainment has been doing significant work on that infrastructure question. In February 2026, United International Pictures appointed Nile as the exclusive distributor for Paramount Pictures and Universal Pictures titles across Nigeria and Ghana, a shift that signals how seriously major Hollywood studios are treating West Africa as a genuine theatrical market. Cameron Hogg, Managing Director of UIP South Africa, said the region is “entering a new phase, with audiences expanding and exhibitors investing in premium experiences.” Silverbird Film Distribution, which held the UIP mandate for over eight years, handed over a business that’s considerably larger than the one it inherited.

Nile has also been working on the production side. A first-look deal signed with UK-based Action Xtreme in late 2025 is designed to co-produce and distribute a slate of action films across the continent, with talent development programs running alongside covering stunt training, action choreography, and production craft. Their first project together, Son of the Soil, was released in Nigerian cinemas in October 2025, with a festival and streaming run to follow. The ambition behind it is to build African action cinema that travels across markets, not just plays locally.

The screen count is the industry’s most stubborn problem. Nigeria has roughly 369 screens across Anglophone West Africa, a figure that hasn’t kept pace with population growth or with the appetite the box office numbers keep confirming. Total admissions actually dropped slightly between 2021 and 2025, from 3.42 million to 2.79 million, even as revenue more than tripled. The market is earning far more from fewer people, which is explained almost entirely by rising ticket prices, not by a broader audience coming through the doors. A consumer survey published alongside FilmOne’s 2025 Nigeria Box Office Yearbook found that cinema remains the preferred entertainment platform over streaming for respondents, and that most consider current ticket prices fair. The constraint isn’t willingness to pay. It’s the number of seats available.

Nile’s distribution deals and co-production push are the kind of work that doesn’t generate headlines the way a billion-naira opening weekend does. But getting more titles into more hands, building relationships with international studios, and developing local talent across the production chain are what make the billion-naira weekends possible in the first place. West Africa’s cinema market is growing. The companies putting in the structural work now are the ones best positioned to shape what it looks like in five years.

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