We all love the John Wick kind of movies, the spectacle of Jason Bourne, the aura of Dwayne Johnson, the charisma of Vin Diesel.
More than 70% of those reading this blog has at one time or the other seen a mission impossible film or a James Bond flick.
So i was just wondering today why is it that I cannot see IK Ogbonna drive an Audi R18 Ultra roughly round the streets of Lekki, Lagos trying to escape Jim Iyke’s hooligans, or OC Ukeje
blow up a building because his friend is being held hostage, i won’t mind a bad ass beat down from Kate Henshaw.
blow up a building because his friend is being held hostage, i won’t mind a bad ass beat down from Kate Henshaw.
I remember when a Nollywood actor performed the stunt of jumping of a one storey balcony, it was big news then, it just leaves me thinking: is Nollywood ready for the big guns?
I would try to streamline this post to three main reasons why Nollywood cannot yet produce high quality action genre movies.
1: Time Frame: Most Nollywood films were thought about, scripted, filmed, produced and released in three months or less. Contrary to their immediate contapact in Hollywood who won’t mind promoting their movie for close to two years as with Fifty Shades Darker, or shoot the movie for nine months only to add five more for the post productions.
Nollywood instead intends to just put something together in a haste, get it out there when it’s not even half ready. This is a major factor affecting the production of high quality action movies high.
2: Lack of Stunt Artist: Most out of the Hollywood action genre movies contain practically impossible stunts, like the unreleased footage from Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation of Tom Cruise hanging off of one of the wings of an airplane thousands of feet in the air. A stunt reportedly performed by himself.
In Nollywood you cannot see something like that, “na who wan die?”
The opening scene of the wedding party where the IV guy allegedly had an accident was probably a work of shaking the camera around, that exactly is the way a typical action scene is being filmed in a Nollywood movie, with the camera shaking right and left, the driver turning the steering wheel any how, insert blank screen, insert the car collide with another or runs into the bush hitting a tree.
Such wacky worshy scene is something that distinguishes the Hollywood Action Genre from ours.
3: Low budget: when Nigerian first produced her million naira movie it hit news headlines then, it’s not until now that producers are learning to trust the Nigerian Movie lovers and churning tens of millions into movie production.
Most Hollywood action genre movies budgets tens of millions of dollars sometimes hundreds which is wide in margin compared to the millions of naira Nollywood puts into movie production.
This millions of dollars, covers the CGIs, Promotions, post productions, editing travel costs and license of shooting in a city.
Over three hundred cars where destroyed in one of the fast and furious movie, some houses were built solely to be blown up for the sake of a scene, some of the debris scene at the aftermath of an action sequence are a real as anything, forget what Wikipedia says about CGIs., ordinarily to bash a car in Nollywood film, the director will be shouting like “aja mi lọ pá”.
Not until Our producers are ready to take the risk and drop a few more millions for productions, we might never see a James Bond worthy Nollywood film.
Since we are in the before 2016/after 2016 era, we just might not know what Nollywood has in-stocked for us.
