Communiqué 107: Nigeria’s film industry finally has a window in Canada
With over 12,000 tickets sold, Snag Productions is providing a pathway for Nollywood to break into Canada’s box office and out of the Nigeria-to-UK distribution box.
1. Nollywood’s night in Toronto
The National Event Venue in Toronto is typically used for weddings, concerts and other community celebrations. But on January 17, it played host to a more unusual event: the Canadian premiere of Behind The Scenes, the latest cinema release from award-winning Nollywood producer Funke Akindele. That evening, the venue’s 700-seat auditorium transformed into a temporary Nigerian cinema. The crowd that gathered was a familiar cross-section of Toronto’s Nigerian diaspora, drawn by the chance to watch one of Nollywood’s biggest stars on the big screen, thousands of kilometres away from home.
Before Behind The Scenes arrived in Toronto, it had already fulfilled what has become the unwritten rule for every Funke Akindele cinema release: that it dethrones the previous Funke Akindele film to become the new number one on Nollywood’s all-time box office chart. This time, however, Behind The Scenes went further than the usual script, becoming the first film to cross the coveted ₦2 billion mark at the Nigerian box office. With the domestic run secured, the film began to travel, first to the UK, then to the US, and finally to Canada, where it grossed over $140,000 in a week.
The Canadian cinema run was made possible by a little-known distribution company called Snag Productions. Founded by two Nigerian immigrants based in Canada, the company is attempting to build a more deliberate pathway for African films into the North American cinema market. Their ambition is not simply to organise occasional screenings for diaspora audiences, but to create a distribution pipeline that allows Nollywood and other African and Black films to circulate more regularly in Canadian cinemas.
2. The international distribution bottleneck
Nigerian films have historically struggled to crack the international cinema market. When Nollywood films travel abroad, their theatrical runs are usually limited and geographically predictable. The UK has become the most reliable overseas destination, largely because of its large Nigerian diaspora and established African film audiences. But outside the UK, the path is less certain. In North America, especially, Nigerian films have rarely secured consistent theatrical distribution. Most screenings happen as one-off diaspora events organised by community groups, rather than as part of a structured distribution strategy. The result is that even Nollywood’s biggest box office hits often struggle to find sustained audiences beyond Nigeria and the UK.
The difficulty of exporting Nollywood films to international cinemas is not simply a matter of ambition, but also of the structural realities of the markets these films seek to enter. Demography, for instance, is a major constraint. In Canada, the potential audience for Nigerian films is still relatively small. According to estimates from the 2021 national census, about 80,000 Canadian immigrants were born in Nigeria. When you expand the bracket to include people of West African heritage, it rises to around 150,000. Even assuming rapid growth since then, the figure likely remains below 400,000 people in a country of more than 30 million. In practical terms, this means the core diaspora audience that typically drives demand for Nollywood abroad represents less than one per cent of the Canadian population. By comparison, the Indian population in Canada is about 1.6 million, and the larger South Asian community stands at 2.6 million, or roughly seven per cent of the population. This helps explain why Indian films such as Dhurandhar have been able to sustain longer theatrical runs, grossing $7 million in Canada.
Another constraint is the structure of the cinema market itself. Canada has about 3,000 cinema screens across roughly 700 locations. But many of these venues operate relatively small multiplexes with limited screens. Screening slots for films are heavily contested. Hollywood releases dominate the schedule, followed by British films, Canadian independent productions, Asian films, and the globally established Bollywood industry. Even within the broader category of Black cinema, films from the United States and Canada tend to take precedence. By the time African films enter the equation, they are competing for a very small portion of an already crowded cinema schedule. This congestion means that even when a Nollywood film secures a theatrical release, sustaining it for several weeks can be difficult. Cinema operators constantly rotate films based on ticket sales, and a movie that cannot demonstrate consistent demand quickly loses its screening slots.
Finally, Nollywood’s international audience remains narrow. Most demand still comes from Nigerians in the diaspora, with limited uptake from Caribbean audiences or Black viewers born and raised in North America. Until Nollywood expands beyond that core demographic, its international theatrical footprint will remain small.
3. Cracking Canada’s cinema market
Snag Productions was created to address this problem in Canada. The company was founded by Damola Layonu and his wife, Chiagoziem Obi, both of whom previously worked at Filmhouse Group in Nigeria. It was there that Layonu first built his experience in film distribution before the couple emigrated to Canada.
Once they arrived, the absence of African content in Canadian cinemas became difficult to ignore. Despite the size and visibility of African communities in cities such as Toronto, Nollywood films were largely absent from the country’s cinema screens. “We were asking ourselves, why can’t we have Nollywood films running and performing well in Canadian cinemas? People say black people don’t go to cinemas, is that a fact? We wanted to find out,” Layonu said to Communiqué.
That question eventually became the foundation for Snag Productions. The company was incorporated in 2022 to build a distribution pathway for African films into the Canadian cinema market. However, it did not hold a screening until two years later, after securing a distribution licence with FilmOne, Layonu’s former employer.
Its first release was Farmer’s Bride, followed by a steady stream of Nollywood titles that helped test the market’s viability. Rather than attempting long theatrical runs immediately, Snag’s strategy has been deliberately cautious. Films are typically released over a weekend first. If ticket sales exceed expectations, the screening window is then extended into a full week. The idea is to demonstrate, through actual ticket sales, that there is a viable audience for Nollywood films in Canadian cinemas.
The company has also begun to think more strategically about the release calendar. Certain kinds of films already dominate at specific times of the year. The December-to-January holiday window, for instance, has become closely associated with blockbuster releases from producers such as Funke Akindele and Toyin Abraham. Valentine’s season has also emerged as a reliable window for romantic films. Actor and producer Timini Egbuson has begun to corner that period with releases such as Reel Love in 2025 and Love Notes in 2026. Snag Productions aims to secure distribution deals with filmmakers during these periods.
Beyond programming strategy, Snag has also begun building partnerships within the Canadian exhibition ecosystem. The company has struck a distribution agreement with Landmark Cinemas, the second-largest cinema chain in Canada, allowing Nollywood titles to screen across multiple locations. In cities where Landmark does not operate, such as Toronto, Snag has relied on Fusion Intelligence’s Convoy distribution platform to stream films to non-cinema locations. Convoy was used during the Canadian run of Behind The Scenes.
Finally, the company is also thinking about the longer-term challenge of content appeal. While diaspora audiences remain the core market for Nollywood abroad, Snag is exploring ways to broaden that reach. As part of that effort, it has partnered with Weaned Child Productions, a studio founded by novelist Umar Turaki, to develop and distribute original content designed to travel more easily with Canadian audiences.
For now, Snag Productions’ strategy is still in its early stages. But the first results suggest that the experiment may be working. When Behind The Scenes sold more than 8,000 tickets, it generated over $140,000 in box office revenue. Toyin Abraham’s Oversabi Aunty also found an audience, selling roughly 4,000 tickets and grossing more than $70,000 during its run.
By Hollywood standards, these figures are modest. But for Nollywood in North America, they represent proof that a consistent audience exists and can be mobilised when films are properly distributed.
Timing is also favourable. Nigerian migration to Canada has accelerated over the past decade, with Nollywood already functioning as an important cultural touchpoint for diaspora communities. As more Nigerians choose Canada and other North American destinations as their preferred migration routes, the audience base that supports these screenings is likely to expand.
For Snag Productions, the long-term ambition is not simply to organise occasional screenings for homesick audiences. It is to normalise the presence of African films within the cinema ecosystem, moving them from sporadic diaspora events into something closer to a regular feature of the North American cinema calendar.
