(By YomiKazeem) - Nollywood’s focus on movie quality over quantity is starting to reap box office returns

The global claim to fame for Nigeria’s Nollywood movie industry has typically been its volume of production, ranked behind only India’s Bollywood.

While that emphasis on low-budget, high-volume production saw Nollywood movies become hugely popular at home and across Africa and the diaspora, it also fostered low standards. But the past decade has seen a new generation filmmakers shift focus from quantity to quality—a move that’s yielding increased international recognition and has seen Nollywood movies increasingly become a big draw for audiences at local cinemas.

Most emblematic of that trend perhaps is The Wedding Party, a 2017 romantic comedy, which became the first Nollywood movie to gross over 400 million naira ($1 million) at local cinemas. Its sequel, released only a year later, did even better. The trend of high earnings have largely continued as Nigerian movies are on track to record gross cinema earnings of over a billion naira ($2.7 million) once again last year after first doing so in 2016.