Anakle Films is back in the news this month for a ten-film deal with Canal+ — a partnership that exists, by Canal+’s own account, because of the international success of The Black Book. That makes this a natural moment for RollCallAfrica to revisit the 2023 action-thriller that turned a Nigerian studio into a Canal+ partner and became one of Netflix’s most-watched non-English titles globally in its release window. What made it travel, and what did it tell us about the ceiling of Nigerian commercial cinema on the global stage?
The Black Book, directed by Editi Effiòng, follows Paul Edima (Richard Mofe-Damijan), a grieving father and former enforcer who takes on a corrupt police and political system after his son is framed and killed. It is a revenge thriller in a recognisable global mode — the aging man of violence pulled back into a world he had left, applying a lethal skill set to the pursuit of justice the system denies him. That familiarity is central to why the film travelled: it spoke a genre language international audiences already understood, while grounding it in specifically Nigerian institutions, corruption, and texture.
Why It Travelled
The film’s global success rested on a specific combination. Its genre — the revenge thriller — is one of the most universally legible in world cinema, requiring no cultural translation for an international audience to follow. Its production ambition was genuine: action sequences, a sustained narrative scale, and a level of technical polish that met the baseline international audiences expect from the thrillers they know. And its emotional core — a father avenging his son, mourning while acting — is among the most universal in all of storytelling. The Black Book found the intersection of the specifically Nigerian and the universally legible, and that intersection is where films travel.
Richard Mofe-Damijan anchors the film with the gravity the role requires — a veteran performer bringing genuine weight to a character whose grief has to be as convincing as his violence. The production design and action choreography, while not at the level of the international films the genre invites comparison to, are ambitious enough to sustain the film’s scale and to signal that Nigerian cinema could operate in this register at all. That signal — that Nollywood could make a globally competitive action-thriller — is a significant part of what the film accomplished, and part of why Canal+ took notice of the studio behind it.
What Its Flaws Told Us
Revisited two years on, the film’s limitations are as instructive as its strengths. The screenplay leans on genre convention more heavily than the best of the form, and some of its plotting prioritises momentum over coherence in ways that reward a forgiving viewing. The action, ambitious for Nollywood, still reveals the budget and infrastructure gap between Nigerian production and the international thrillers it echoes. These are not disqualifying flaws — the film works, and its global audience is proof — but they mark the ceiling that Nigerian commercial cinema was operating against in 2023.
That ceiling is the most useful thing The Black Book revealed. It demonstrated that a Nigerian film could reach a massive global audience through the streaming platforms and the universal language of genre — and it simultaneously showed the production gap that remained between Nollywood’s ambition and the international standard. The film’s success was real and its flaws were real, and together they mapped exactly where Nigerian commercial cinema stood on the global stage: capable of reaching the world, not yet capable of matching the technical scale of the films it was competing against. Two years later, with Anakle now a Canal+ partner, the question is whether the ten-film slate will close that gap or simply repeat the formula that opened the door.
RCA Score: 7.6 — Good Commercial Cinema
The Black Book (2023) · Dir. Editi Effiòng · Nigeria · Anakle Films · Netflix · Stars: Richard Mofe-Damijan, Ade Laoye, Sam Dede, Alex Usifo, Shaffy Bello · Genre: Action / Thriller.
— Adaeze Okoye. RollCallAfrica, Lagos. 4 August 2026. Sources: Netflix (The Black Book viewership data, 2023), Anakle Films, RollCallAfrica television and film coverage.
