Let me state the situation plainly and then ask the question that the industry has not yet asked publicly.
Canal+ — a French media conglomerate headquartered in Paris, majority-controlled through Vivendi by the Bolloré Group, a French family holding company with a long and complicated commercial history on the African continent — completed its $2 billion acquisition of MultiChoice Group in September 2025. On April 1, 2026, it killed Showmax. The streaming platform that had spent two years and a combined $309 million attempting to compete with Netflix was shut down, its content migrated to DStv, its commissioning operation ended.
Every outlet covered the Showmax story. The loss of a commissioning platform for African content is a real loss and deserves the coverage it received.
What has not been covered is this: MultiChoice created the Africa Magic Viewers’ Choice Awards in 2013. The AMVCA has spent thirteen years developing into the most commercially influential awards body in African screen culture. A nomination changes a project’s insurance premium. A win changes a talent’s billing rate. The ecosystem of budgets, casting decisions, distribution priorities, and marketing investments across West, East, and Southern African production has been quietly calibrated around who the AMVCA rewards and how.
That awards body is now owned by Canal+.
What Ownership Actually Means
I want to be precise here, because imprecision would undermine the argument. Canal+ owning the AMVCA does not mean, in any mechanical or demonstrable sense, that award outcomes are compromised. The voting process has its own structure. The industry jury has its own integrity. I am not suggesting that envelopes are being opened in Paris before they are opened in Lagos.
What I am suggesting is that the framing and scope and category architecture of the most commercially significant African film awards is now subject to decisions made by a board that answers to European shareholders with European return-on-investment expectations. The question of which categories exist, which territories are included, which genres are legitimised, which productions are eligible — these are structural decisions that shape the entire award, and they now sit inside a corporate governance structure that has no democratic accountability to African filmmakers or African audiences.
When MultiChoice created the AMVCA in 2013, it was a South African company with South African shareholders and a primary business interest in the growth and health of African content ecosystems. MultiChoice’s incentive to support African production quality was commercially aligned with its survival as a business. That alignment was imperfect and the company made many decisions that frustrated African filmmakers over the years. But the alignment existed.
Canal+’s primary business interest is the optimisation of a €2.17 billion quarterly revenue base across 70 countries. Africa is one region within that portfolio. The AMVCA is one asset within that region. The incentive structure has changed.
The Showmax Precedent
When Canal+ killed Showmax, it did so with the language of efficiency. The platform was losing money. The investment was not returning projections. The decision was commercially rational from the perspective of a company targeting €250 million in cost savings across 2026.
What the Showmax closure demonstrated is that Canal+’s commitment to African content infrastructure has an explicit financial floor: it continues until it costs too much. Showmax cost too much. It was ended.
The AMVCA does not cost too much — it is a relatively inexpensive event to produce relative to its commercial value as a platform for DStv brand positioning. So it will continue. But the precedent established by Showmax is that continuation is conditional on commercial utility, not on cultural or industrial importance. The continent’s creative community should factor that conditional into how it relates to the award.
What the Industry Could Do
I am not arguing that the AMVCA should be boycotted or that its nominations should be treated as worthless. I am arguing that the continent’s film industry should be having a serious conversation — at AFRIFF, at the Lagos Film Festival, at FESPACO, in the trade press — about what it means to have the primary commercial validation mechanism for African screen culture owned by a foreign conglomerate.
That conversation should include: What would an African-owned, pan-continental awards body look like? Who would finance it? Who would govern it? What would its commercial value be to a continent-based media partner, and who are the continent-based media partners with the scale to support it?
These are not rhetorical questions. They have answers. The answers require organisation and investment and the kind of patient, infrastructure-minded thinking that tends to get crowded out by the immediate cycles of production and release and awards season.
But the Showmax closure has clarified something that should have been obvious since September 2025: nobody in Paris is building African film infrastructure for the benefit of African filmmakers. They are building it for as long as it serves a European commercial strategy. The AMVCA, currently, serves that strategy. The day it doesn’t, the decision-making will be the same as it was for Showmax.
The industry has been warned, in the plainest possible terms, by the same company that now owns the award it is competing for.
— Lerato Dlamini has covered African cinema and the screen industry from Johannesburg for twenty-five years. She has attended every AMVCA since its inaugural 2013 edition.
