Until the economics of cinema-oriented Nollywood change, films like Behind The Scenes will continue to define what success looks like on the biggest screens available.
By Joseph Jonathan
When Funke Akindele’s Behind The Scenes crossed the ₦2 billion box-office mark, it was not just a commercial milestone; it was a declaration of the continued viability of cinemas as Nollywood’s primary distribution channel. At a time when the industry is still reeling from the retreat of global streaming platforms, the film’s run reasserts cinema as a viable centre of gravity. It confirms Akindele as the most reliable architect of theatrical success in contemporary Nigerian filmmaking.
Since 2020, Funke Akindele has assembled the most consistent box-office run in Nollywood history. It began with Omo Ghetto: The Saga (₦636M), before hardening into a steady December release strategy through Battle on Buka Street (₦670M) in 2022, A Tribe Called Judah (₦1.4B) in 2023, and Everybody Loves Jenifa (₦1.8B) in 2024. These releases are no longer just films but annual theatrical events. Behind The Scenes does not arrive as an anomaly, but as the clearest expression yet of a system Akindele has been methodically perfecting.
But behind the celebrations and congratulatory press releases lies a more complex question: What does this level of commercial dominance mean for the kind of cinema Nollywood produces, values, and ultimately becomes?
There is what I’d like to call the Akindele cinematic universe, and it runs on recognisable mechanics. Her films are engineered for maximum relatability, built around moral lessons wrapped in broad comedy, populated by large ensemble casts that ensure cross-demographic appeal, and structured to deliver emotional beats at predictable intervals. Behind the Scenes follows this template faithfully.
The film centres on Aderonke “Ronke” Faniran (Scarlet Gomez), a real estate mogul whose wealth has made her the ATM for her entire extended family. Ronke gives until there’s nothing left; funding siblings’ education, paying employees’ salaries at her friend’s failing company, and shouldering the burden of nieces and nephews while her own health deteriorates. It’s a premise that resonates viscerally with Nigerian audiences. The phenomenon of black tax—the expectation that successful individuals must financially support their entire family network—is not an abstract theory here. It’s lived reality, a social contract enforced by guilt, tradition, and emotional manipulation
Funke Akindele understands this pain point intimately, and she exploits it with precision. The film’s strongest moments come when it simply mirrors what many Nigerians experience: the entitled sibling who never learned gratitude, the father who views his child’s success as his retirement plan, the friends who conflate generosity with obligation. These dynamics don’t require nuance to land; they require recognition, and Akindele delivers recognition in abundance.
What Akindele understands—perhaps better than anyone else in Nollywood right now—is that cinema audiences do not pay primarily for surprise. They pay for recognition. Behind The Scenes is engineered to feel immediately legible: the characters are archetypal, the conflicts are familiar, and the emotional beats are clearly signposted. The film’s pleasure lies not in narrative discovery but in communal affirmation; watching one’s lived experiences translated into heightened, accessible spectacle.
But recognition alone doesn’t explain a ₦2 billion gross. What Funke Akindele has mastered is the conversion of relatability into spectacle. Her films do not just acknowledge family dysfunction; they amplify it to operatic proportions. In Behind The Scenes, Ronke doesn’t just support her family; she pays five months’ worth of salaries for an entire company of employees that aren’t even hers. She doesn’t just feel unappreciated; she fakes her own death to test whether anyone actually cares about her beyond her bank account.
The plot twist is telegraphed from the opening act, the emotional beats are underlined with melodramatic music, and the resolution arrives tied in a neat bow with a wedding finale because every Akindele blockbuster needs a big celebration.
This is a formula, but it’s a perfected formula. Akindele has identified the emotional temperature at which Nigerian audiences reliably respond, and she delivers that temperature with consistency. Her comedic rhythms, the switch between English and Yoruba, the exaggerated physical comedy, and the strategic deployment of slapstick are as distinctive as a fingerprint.
Even when she steps away from her signature Jenifa persona (which she largely does here as Adetutu, Ronke’s parasitic sister), the tonal signatures remain. The Akindele brand is bigger than any single character; it’s a sensibility, a guarantee of what the audience will experience.
That sensibility is inseparable from Funke Akindele’s authorship. Even when she is not the protagonist, her creative signature is unmistakable. The tonal oscillation between melodrama and comedy, the reliance on exaggerated interpersonal conflict, the moral spoon-feeding, and the careful calibration of laughter before tragedy are all hallmarks of her storytelling.
The performances are similarly aligned with this philosophy. Scarlet Gomez anchors the film with restraint, playing Ronke despite the character’s fundamental blandness. She’s written as saintly to the point of doormat, which makes her transformation in the third act feel abrupt rather than earned.
Around her, the supporting cast leans into excess: entitlement is loud, greed is theatrical, and vulnerability arrives only when the script demands it. Tobi Bakre brings charisma to Adewale, the entitled younger brother, though his character arc from spoiled brat to reformed family man after a single tragedy collapses under minimal scrutiny. Akindele herself, as Adetutu, walks a careful line between caricature and critique, occasionally slipping into familiar comic cadences but largely resisting the gravitational pull of her Jenifa persona. Even though the character is essentially a collection of selfish-sibling clichés arranged in chronological order.
These performances are not subtle, but they are effective, precisely because subtlety is not the film’s goal. What’s missing is the sense that these performances exist in the same reality. Everyone seems to be acting in a slightly different movie; some playing it for broad comedy, others aiming for melodrama, a few reaching for something resembling naturalism. The tonal inconsistency isn’t disastrous, but it creates a flatness where there should be texture, a sense that we’re watching assembled pieces rather than an integrated whole.
If there’s a defining characteristic of the Akindele cinematic universe, it’s didacticism. Her films don’t trust audiences to derive meaning from drama; they deliver meaning pre-packaged, spelled out in dialogue that functions more like thesis statements than human speech. Behind The Scenes is no exception.
The moral lessons arrive with the subtlety of a public service announcement: Set boundaries with family. Don’t let people take advantage of your generosity. Success means nothing if you lose yourself in the process. Self-care isn’t selfish. These aren’t wrong messages; they’re important conversations, especially in a culture where martyrdom is often confused with love. But the film delivers them with such heavy-handed earnestness that they cease to function as drama and instead become instruction.
Consider the scene where Victor (Uzor Arukwe), Ronke’s lawyer and best friend, explains her medical condition to the family after the fake-death reveal. He doesn’t speak like a human being; he speaks like a ChatGPT prompt asked to summarise a Wikipedia article on burnout and stress-related illness. Every line is loaded with information, with moral significance, with the weight of the lesson being taught. There’s no room for subtext because the text is doing all the work.
This approach to storytelling—what we might call the Moral Industrial Complex—represents a particular understanding of what mainstream Nollywood audiences want or need. It’s a model inherited from Yoruba travelling theatre, where performers would tour villages delivering stories with clear moral frameworks, often featuring trickster figures who learned hard lessons and cautionary tales about greed, jealousy, and pride. Funke Akindele, who came up through Yoruba-language television before crossing over to mainstream success, carries this tradition with her.
The question is whether this tradition translates effectively to contemporary cinema, or whether it represents an evolutionary dead end. There’s commercial evidence for the former (₦2 billion doesn’t lie), but there’s artistic evidence for the latter. The films feel static, predictable, and more interested in confirming what audiences already believe than in challenging them to think differently. They’re comfort food, which is fine, except that comfort food rarely pushes cuisine forward.
The script follows the same templatic structure we’ve seen in multiple Akindele productions: establish the problem (family exploitation), escalate through a series of increasingly absurd incidents (the five-month salary payment, various betrayals, mounting financial pressure), trigger a crisis (health scare), deploy the twist (fake death), deliver the resolution (family learns their lesson), close with a celebration (wedding).
It’s a formula that works, in the same way that fast food franchises work; consistent, reliable, efficiently delivered, but ultimately lacking the complexity that separates a meal from mere sustenance.
Behind The Scenes is fundamentally interested in family exploitation and the toll of unchecked generosity: themes that could sustain a powerful, nuanced exploration. But the film never trusts itself to go deep. Every potentially complex moment is immediately resolved with a joke, a plot twist, or a moral lesson. The narrative can’t sit with discomfort; it has to constantly reassure the audience that everything will be okay, that lessons will be learned, that justice (such as it is) will be served.
Take Adetutu’s arc, for instance. She’s established as thoroughly selfish, manipulative, and entitled: someone who has spent decades exploiting her sister’s generosity without remorse. This is promising material for a character study: What makes someone become this way? How do family dynamics create and reinforce these patterns? What would genuine transformation look like, and is it even possible?
The film isn’t interested in these questions. Adetutu remains a cartoon, broadly played for laughs until the plot requires her to have a tearful realisation and suddenly become supportive. There’s no psychology here, no sense of a real person struggling with the gap between who she is and who she wishes she were.
This isn’t necessarily bad filmmaking in the technical sense. The movie is competently made, well-shot (if overly glossy), and somewhat adequately paced. The problem is that it’s incurious. It sees its characters not as mysteries to be explored but as lessons to be illustrated. It sees its themes not as complex social dynamics but as moral equations to be solved. It sees cinema not as a medium for discovery but as a vehicle for confirmation.
This is the creative cost of commercial logic. When films are optimised for maximum accessibility and minimum risk, they tend toward the generic. They sand down their rough edges, avoid ambiguity, ensure that every question has a clear answer, and every conflict has a clear resolution. They become proficient at delivering what audiences expect while carefully avoiding anything that might challenge those expectations.
Visually, Behind The Scenes embraces the glossy aesthetic that now defines mainstream Nollywood cinema. Expensive interiors, immaculate costuming, and hyper-polished faces signal wealth even when emotional realism might call for rougher edges. The result is a world that feels aspirational rather than lived-in, where authenticity is secondary to legibility. Product placement, meanwhile, is not hidden; it is integrated into the spectacle, another reminder that this is cinema as commerce, calibrated to recover investment as efficiently as possible.
This is where the film’s economics become inseparable from its aesthetics. Behind The Scenes is designed to offend as few people as possible while resonating with as many as it can. Its moral universe is uncomplicated, its villains clearly marked, and its resolutions tidy.
These choices are not creative failures so much as economic strategies. In a cinema ecosystem where ticket prices are high and theatrical outings are deliberate decisions, filmmakers like Akindele build films that justify attendance through familiarity and emotional payoff rather than formal risk.
Yet, this success raises uncomfortable questions. If Behind The Scenes represents what Nollywood’s box office currently rewards, what kinds of stories are being disincentivised? Films that thrive on ambiguity, visual experimentation, or quiet interiority struggle to survive in a system optimised for crowd response. Creative legitimacy increasingly becomes tethered to commercial performance, narrowing the range of narratives deemed “worth” cinema space.
So we return to the central question: What does Funke Akindele’s dominance mean for Nollywood?
On one hand, it means proof of concept. Akindele has demonstrated that Nigerian theatrical releases can compete with Hollywood imports, can draw massive audiences, and can generate substantial revenue. She’s shown that there’s a viable commercial model for Nollywood filmmaking, one that doesn’t require external funding or international co-productions. She’s created jobs, launched careers, and built infrastructure. These are real and significant achievements.
On the other hand, it means the consolidation of a particular aesthetic and business model that may crowd out alternatives. When one filmmaker is this dominant, when one formula is this successful, it creates powerful incentives for others to imitate rather than innovate. It suggests that the path to success in Nollywood is narrower than we might hope, that there’s a “right way” to make commercially viable films and everything else is risky experimentation.
The danger isn’t that Akindele exists or succeeds. The danger is that she becomes the only model, that her success calcifies into orthodoxy, that “Nollywood film” increasingly means “Akindele-style film” because that’s what generates revenue, that’s what cinemas will book, that’s what investors will fund.
The same thing happened in American studio filmmaking, where the success of the Marvel Cinematic Universe led to a decade of studios trying to replicate its model, crowding out mid-budget dramas, comedies, and original IPs in favour of franchise tentpoles and cinematic universes. The same thing happened in Korean television, where the massive success of certain drama formats led to an extended period of formulaic production before a new generation of creators pushed back with shows like Squid Game (2021) and The Glory (2022).
Regardless, it would be dishonest to dismiss Akindele’s achievement as mere populism. To consistently draw audiences into cinemas—across economic downturns, post-streaming uncertainty, and rising ticket costs—requires an acute understanding of audience psychology. Funke Akindele’s films work because they respect the emotional intelligence of their viewers, even when they simplify moral complexity. She knows her audience not as an abstract demographic, but as a collective seeking recognition, laughter, and catharsis.
In that sense, Behind The Scenes is less a creative endpoint than a diagnostic tool. It reveals a Nollywood in which spectacle, star power, and emotional familiarity are rewarded more reliably than innovation; where authorship is measured by consistency rather than reinvention; and where cinema success increasingly depends on one’s ability to mobilise communal experience at scale.
The ₦2 billion milestone matters, but not because it proves Nollywood has “arrived”. It matters because it clarifies where Nollywood currently stands, what it values, and who it makes room for. Funke Akindele’s dominance is not accidental; it is structural. And until the economics of cinema-oriented Nollywood change, films like Behind The Scenes will continue to define what success looks like on the biggest screens available.
What Funke Akindele has effectively built is not just a creative brand, but a risk-management model for Nigerian cinemas. In an industry where theatrical attendance is increasingly precarious, her films offer predictability: star power, family-friendly humour, clear moral positioning, and communal appeal. For exhibitors, an Akindele release is not a gamble but a scheduling anchor. For investors, it is one of the few Nollywood propositions with historical data to justify confidence.
Behind the Scenes is, ultimately, a film that does exactly what it sets out to do. It entertains its target audience, delivers its moral lessons, provides satisfying emotional beats, and makes a lot of money. Within the parameters it sets for itself, it succeeds.
The question is whether those parameters are sufficient. Whether a Nollywood defined by these parameters is the Nollywood we want to build. Whether “success” should be measured solely in naira, or whether there are other metrics—creative ambition, formal innovation, thematic complexity, cultural impact—that matter at least as much.
Joseph Jonathan is a historian who seeks to understand how film shapes our cultural identity as a people. He believes that history is more about the future than the past. When he’s not writing about film, you can catch him listening to music or discussing politics. He tweets @Chukwu2big.