Brand New Day: Forget cinemas, Africa is embracing alternatives

Massive box-office receipts, for example in South Africa, for global blockbusters indicate that Africa’s movie appetite is growing but also mask a deeper shift as the volume of premium screens shrinks. Increasingly, African capital is expanding, and filmmakers are embracing alternative, community‑driven distribution models.

On 3 August 2026, Sony Pictures confirmed that its latest collaboration with Marvel Studios, Spider-Man: Brand New Day , had delivered the biggest opening weekend in South African cinema history, grossing more than R44m ($2,682,284). Ster-Kinekor and Nu-Metro cinemas repeatedly sold out nationwide in South Africa during the weekend.

Globally, it opened to between $927m and $942m, the second-largest global debut ever behind only Avengers: Endgame .

At first glance, these numbers show tangible proof that African cinema is thriving – but the wider picture is more revealing. Africa’s entertainment market has matured to the point where demand continues to grow even as the infrastructure, ownership and distribution of that entertainment are undergoing profound change.

Though headline openings have gotten bigger, the continent’s cinema industry, as a whole, has shrunk significantly over the past decade. Ster-Kinekor, Africa’s largest cinema operator, ran 400 screens across 55 multiplexes in 2015. By late 2025, the company had downsized to roughly 34 complexes and pulled out of all international locations barring two sites in Namibia and Zambia.

South Africa’s second-largest cinema firm, Nu-Metro, has also seen a similar downturn – going from 21 sites to 17 nationwide even while taking over a few of Ster-Kinekor’s flagship locations such as their spot in Durban’s Gateway Theatre of Shopping.

Both firms frame this as a consolidation of business activity rather than a downsizing. Ster-Kinekor CEO, Mark Sardi, touts a 20% rise in admissions year-on-year between November 2025 and April 2026, which he credits to a stronger portfolio of Hollywood releases such as Mission: Impossible: The Final Reckoning and Lilo & Stitch. This, in addition to premium formats such as IMAX and their Gateway Mall location’s newly installed 270-degree ScreenX, has built a sense of novelty, intrigue and demand amongst consumers.

In West Africa, Filmhouse and Silverbird have modernised their flagship complexes in major cities across Nigeria, but regional and nationwide screen density remains far below South Africa’s, much less global benchmarks.

In short, cinemas are now betting on fewer, larger and more premium sites rather than having a broad geographic footprint. While Brand New Day ’s performance decidedly validates this strategy on a commercial level, the approach leaves those outside of major commercial hubs around the continent with little to no cinema access at all.

Owning the story

Nigeria’s Nollywood remains the volume leader when it comes to media production in Africa, second only to India’s Bollywood in global output. The era in which Netflix-led investment dominated headlines is steadily giving way to a model financed increasingly by African institutions, private investors and the diaspora.

Afreximbank, through its investment arm FEDA, launched the Pan-African Film Fund in May 2025 – targeting up to $1bn for film, television and immersive media across the continent, naming production house One Street Studios as co-general partner in mid-2026.

The fund is designed to finance production, post-production infrastructure, digital distribution and exhibition networks together, treating African storytelling as an export sector rather than a series of one-off commissions.

Meanwhile, private equity firms such as MBO Capital are acquiring Nollywood’s domestic distribution pipelines directly, rather than licensing finished content. This means that local filmmakers are receiving larger upfront production budgets in exchange for the rights for long-term control of their films’ distribution pipelines.

Industry voices have framed this as filmmakers licensing cultural products to Netflix for a season, while private capital quietly buys the permanent infrastructure underneath.

In the same vein, local filmmakers are also taking film distribution into their own hands. While some beat a novel path, utilising platforms such as YouTube or Vimeo, others are taking a leaf from the past.

Joseph Jonathan of T he Lagos Revie w posits that the release strategy of the Nigerian blockbuster movie, Agesinkole 2 – which chose to dispense with cinemas and go directly to the communities – “perhaps [shows that] the future of Nigerian cinema is not only about building more cinemas but about rethinking where cinema itself happens. That industrial achievement inevitably shapes how one approaches the film itself.”

He notes, however, that “while a novelty in the age of cinemas and streaming, it is not entirely new – the community theatre style was favoured by the likes of Herbert Ogunde and Ade Love in the 70s, with rural dwellers entertained at night with screens attached to trucks. Their ‘Travelling theatre’ formula was essentially upgraded to ‘Travelling Cinema.’”

A similar tradition took root in Ghana in the late 1980s, where mobile cinema operators travelled the country with a television, VCR and a portable generator, setting up screenings in villages without access to electricity or formal cinemas.

These movie club businesses became distinctive enough to produce their own visual culture, hand-painted posters advertising each film (which have seen a resurgence in modern times) now recontextualised, collected and exhibited as art in their own right.

Seminal painters of this golden era such as D.A. Jasper are now regarded as fine artists, frequently exhibiting in galleries around the world and frequently collaborating with brands in the fashion space such as Daily Paper, PUMA and The New Originals.

These traditions indicate an established cultural affinity for this style of distribution, the effect of which can only be strengthened by Africans owning both the stories and the means of telling them.

From Ster-Kinekor’s bet on fewer, more premium screens to Afreximbank and MBO Capital’s push to own Nollywood’s distribution pipelines outright, to Agesinkole 2 and Ghana’s mobile cinema tradition before it, the pattern across Africa’s film industry is consistent.

Formal distribution is consolidating in some places – and outright retreating in others – but African capital and African filmmakers are increasingly filling that space on their own terms, whether through bigger cinema investments, direct ownership of infrastructure, or simply meeting audiences where they already are, as they have for decades.

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