by Wilfred Okiche

Between 2014 and 2015, thanks to one of those occasional twists of fate that occur in the film business once in a while, Nollywood crowned a new box-office champ.

She isn’t named AY Makun, hasn’t been on TIME magazine’s Influential 100 and isn’t quite the effortless hit on red carpets. Her social media presence is significant but not weighty enough to merit the title of most liked or followed on any platform. Oprah probably doesn’t know her name, she does not have a signature (comic) character created to mint money by the millions, and international NGO’s aren’t exactly lining up to support her next project.

But Omoni Oboli, movie star, producer, scriptwriter and director has something that only few of her peers can boast of; consistent box office bankability. In an era where Nollywood content producers are struggling to catch the interest of audiences glued to Hollywood blockbusters, Omoni Oboli is one of those certified names that can fill seats in cinema halls nationwide. Her name above the title of a film, and picture on posters can summon up audiences out of nowhere.

Between 2014 and 2016, Omoni Oboli has appeared in some of the highest grossing Nollywood films ever made. Her directorial debut, Being Mrs Elliot did brisk business and she followed it up with the clumsy but respectably performing fairy tale, The First Lady.

With the Biyi Bandele directed ensemble drama, Fifty, Oboli proved that when not doing her own stuff, she could make strategic decisions as to what projects to appear in. The Mo Abudu powered glossy meditation on being a Nigerian woman of a certain age was a huge one, as it quickly became the highest grossing Nollywood film of 2015. The very next year, Oboli was back behind the screens, – and in front of it as well,- with the ripped from the headlines dramedy, Wives on Strike.

This white hot streak was considered one of its kind for a single Nollywood player, until AY came calling with the duo of 30 Days in Atlanta and A Trip to Jamaica, as well as a cameo appearance in the record obliterating The Wedding Party.

Being Mrs Oboli

Omoni Oboli’s rise to the top of the film industry’s food chain may be fun to watch now but it did not come to her by chance, neither did it happen overnight. Hers is a story of determination, grit, being at the right place at the right time, shrewd manipulation, perseverance and the connections of friends in high places. Like most life phenomena, not one of these factors can be singled out as the sole reason for her success.

As a child growing up in the then Delta Steel Company (DSC) complex, young Omoni wanted nothing more than to display her talent in stage productions at school and in the church. According to her, the very first lines she muttered in a stage production were ‘’the Bible says that he who does not work should not eat.’’ She carried this love for drama through secondary school and before long, began to appear in Nollywood films.

Her first film role was as an extra in the 1995 Kesse Jabari headliner, Bitter Encounter. More bit part roles followed before she hit her stride playing lead roles in films produced by Fidelis Duker and Hilda Dokubo. Just when she was on the verge of becoming a household name, Omoni left Lagos for the University of Benin to complete her studies in European Languages, with a major in French.

As she was rounding up school, Nnamdi, a young Optometrist whom she had met briefly during her days in Lagos resurfaced and the pair began dating. He proposed shortly after and they got married in 2000. She was 21.

The couple went about building their young family, with stints in the United Kingdom and the United States of America. Ten years and three kids later, the Obolis returned to Nigeria and Omoni was ready to reclaim lost ground career wise. However she was to discover the hard way that in Nollywood, you are only as good as your last job and no one really cared about a non-working woman from a decade past.

Oboli had to learn to work her way up all over again and describes this period as her greatest professional challenge. Thankfully, she scored an audition with Emem Isong Misodi, the producer who handed important breaks to Stella Damasus and Nse-Ikpe Etim when they needed help the most.

At the time, Emem Isong was approaching the heights of her influence and was able to cast Oboli in supporting turns, alongside Genevieve Nnaji and Desmond Elliot in films such as Unfinished Business. Oboli credits Lancelot Imasuen with introducing her to Isong and for casting her in his own projects at a time everyone had forgotten about her.

Everything changed for Oboli when Kunle Afolayan, fresh off the success of his debut film, Irapada, cast her as Mona, the femme fatale who is caught in a battle of wills and strength between Ramsey Nouah and Afolayan in the classic psychologic thriller, The Figurine (Araromire). Released in 2009, The Figurine changed the game in Nollywood in terms of quality of production and blockbuster status results recorded.

Although The Figurine arrived at a time when only a handful of cinemas were functional,- and mostly in Lagos,- the film received ecstatic reviews and went on to set the record for the highest grossing Nollywood film in cinemas with total box office receipts approximating 30 million Naira, winning every important movie prize along the way.

The Figurine may have introduced Omoni Oboli to millions of Nigerians around the world, but after all the noise had settled, it wasn’t enough to keep the job offers coming. Oboli (and her publicist at the time,) showed an early knack for understanding the Nigerian psyche and factors that contribute to the star making process.

All of a sudden, news began to make the rounds, in backwater online blogs and entertainment pages of major dailies that a certain Nigerian actress had turned down a $500,000 offer from Hollywood (no less) to star in a film that required heavy scenes of nudity.

Omoni Oboli was the actress. It didn’t matter that the film in question and its producers were never named, and that the story sounded as improbable as any half-baked PR confection, local press ran with it and Oboli took the opportunity to further implant herself into the minds and consciousness of Nigerians.

Here was a virtuous woman, a married woman who refused to sacrifice her dignity on the altar of professional advancement. Few doubted the story, and fewer still thought to interrogate the idea of a relatively unknown Nigerian actress in Hollywood commanding such a fee. When questioned directly on the issue, Oboli claimed to have no idea where such stories are generated from.

Post Figurine, Oboli’s career moved like the speed of light. She had spent over ten years waiting to become an overnight success. A lead role in Leo Nzekwe’s immigration drama, Anchor Baby followed and Oboli received some of the strongest reviews of her career so far, including an Africa Movie Academy Award (AMAA) nomination for Best Actress. She was also nominated in 2016 alongside three of her co-stars (Ikpe-Etim, Ireti Doyle and Dakore Akande) for their lead role in Fifty.

Omoni 2.0

Because the 2014 film, Being Mrs Elliot is Omoni Oboli’s directorial debut, it has erroneously been recorded as the film that kick started Oboli’s reinvention as modern day auteur. The credit for this should instead go to the Ikechukwu Onyeka directed Brother’s Keeper in which Oboli produced, wrote the screenplay and starred in.

Before then, Oboli had written a couple of screenplays that got made, (Fatal Imagination) but it was with Brother’s Keeper that she could exert major creative control. Before Brother’s Keeper hit audiences, Oboli had also played roles in films like Bent and Feathered Dreams but none on the same scale as The Figurine. 2013 was spent on the low key, creating content and moving from one set to the other. Oboli maintained visibility by writing a column for Daily Independent newspapers.

With the release of Brother’s Keeper, from the stable of Dioni visions, the production company the Obolis conjointly run, Omoni proved herself a triple threat, pulling off a strong, albeit campy performance while also working behind the scenes.

Her next film roles were a mixture of the acceptable (Render to Caeser) and the downright disappointing (Deep Inside,) but months later, Oboli was ready to add directing to the list of her achievements. She gathered a cast that included Ghana’s Majid Michel, comedians AY, Lepacious Bose and hightailed it to Asaba and Ekiti states for her first attempt.

Omoni’s Law

One of the open secrets of Oboli’s success as a filmmaker is her knack for courting publicity for her projects. In this regard, Oboli is second only to Ebony Life’s Mo Abudu. Oboli realised in her second coming that she was going to have to make things happen for herself in terms of job opportunities and went about it like a woman with plenty to prove. After Being Mrs Elliot was finished, Oboli scored a private screening at the presidential villa but was roundly criticized in media circles for her dress, a lengthy blue gown with a plunging neckline.

Oboli chose to direct the comments to the promotion of her film. Aso Rock may have approved, but the film critics concluded that Being Mrs Elliot was a long way from excellent even though Oboli showed promise as a filmmaker. The film suffered from some rookie mistakes on the part of the director and could not quite stick to one genre.

To create hype for the 2016 film, Wives on Strike, Omoni Oboli and her co-stars (Chioma Chukwuka Akpotha, Uche Jombo Rodriguez), and even Emem Isong were subjects of an Instagram faux fight that had the ladies throw shade at each other. With a reported total of about 71million Naira in box office takings, Wives on Strike finished 2016 as one of the highest grossing films, behind the trio of The Wedding Party, A Trip to Jamaica, and 76.

Not all publicity trailing Omoni Oboli has been good and some have found a way to stick because of their consistency. Being Mrs Elliot, an exaggerated tale of a body swap and the consequences bears more than a striking resemblance to a little seen 1996 Hollywood film, Mrs Winterbourne, starring Brendan Fraser.

Still the interest garnered by Being Mrs Elliot was enough to inspire another attempt, this time with the instantly forgettable Cinderella story, The First Lady. By the time Oboli rolled around to putting out her next feature length, Wives on Strikes in 2017, rumbles began to make the rounds that the film was a rip off of Spike Lee’s 2015 drama, Chi-Raq, itself a reimagining of Lysistrata, a classic Greek anti-war comedy by Aristophanes.

When the rumblings continued to gather momentum, Oboli dispatched a lengthy press release containing details and facts that refuted the allegations levelled against her. Apparently Wives on Strike commenced principal photography long before Lee’s film. Claiming digs on the idea, she wrote, ‘’When I shot the movie, or back when I was writing the script, the idea of going on strike was just fantasy and wishful thinking, not knowing that it had really been conceived by other women in practice, or by other filmmakers and playwrights in theory.’’

In September last year, Oboli commenced promotional activities for a new project, Okafor’s Law which was chosen for screening at the Toronto International Film Festival, under the Lagos City to City spotlight. A Canadian based AMAA winning writer, Jude Idada came forward, via an exclusive interview with industry online site, True Nollywood Stories, and accused Omoni Oboli of claiming his copyright after bringing nothing else but the title to the project.

Idada alleged that his history with Oboli goes as far back as Being Mrs Elliot when he was commissioned for a screenplay but the deal eventually fell through as the Obolis decided to go in a different direction. However he claimed that the final draft for Being Mrs Elliot was just as he proposed.

Oboli for reasons best known to her kept mum about these allegations, as though they were minor inconveniences, instead of the potential firestorm that it was, capable of torpedoing the roll out of her new project. She went about promoting Okafor’s Law, at Toronto and on her social media platforms but ignored every attempt to get her to address Idada’s claims.

A riled up Oboli instead chose to attack this writer via an Instagram post for a five line post on her film, Wives on Strike which she considered in bad faith. Working herself up into a righteous fury, Oboli lashed out, first heaping praises upon herself as ‘’an AMAZING writer and a great producer’’ before challenging naysayers to go ahead and produce their own films.

First Lady

Even though she started her career back when the most prestigious Nollywood films went straight to video, Omoni Oboli is indeed a product of the box office system. Since her breakout role in The Figurine, she has been in other major money makers like Fifty and Wives on Strike with well over 200million in total box office earnings. Ireti Doyle is the only actress to have been in more profitable films of recent (The Wedding Party, Fifty) but while Ms Doyle has in most cases, been part of an ensemble in movies that could have done just fine without her presence, people actually put money down to see Omoni Oboli headline films.

The likes of AY and Funke Akindele-Bello have arrived at their bankability statuses by creating larger than life comic characters that instinctively lend themselves to franchises, but Oboli has played it a bit more straight, finding success in more diverse genres like dramas and thrillers. She lists American Tyler Perry as one of her idols.

Oboli has cultivated her audience carefully and her own movies, even when short on quality, manage to strike a nerve. This may be because Oboli tends to make broadly appealing, low denominator comedies that remain relatable even when sprinkled with doses of fantasia.  

The battle royale between Omoni Oboli and Jude Idada, however it pans out, is bound to be instructive, with larger consequences for the industry as regards intellectual property licensing and copyright laws. Thursday afternoon, Justice Ibrahim Buba of the Federal High Court Ikoyi, lifted the injunction preventing the premiere and release of Okafor’s Law and an excited Oboli tweeted, ‘’Glory be to God!!!!!!!!!!!’’

As both parties are forced to seek a resolution once and for all, Okafor’s Law looks set to reap all the rewards as interest for the film is an at all-time high. If this can translate directly into box office sales, – and it has to considering litigation fee costs,- then Oboli may yet have another winner on her hands.

She may be great at coming forth with interesting ways to generate buzz for her projects but even she couldn’t buy this kind of publicity.