Cinema-going in Lagos: three locations, one film, one weekend

Nollywood audiences are under-researched. Understanding audiences’ sites of spectatorship has contributed to how and why Nollywood is consumed, and with what cultural implications for these audiences, and for producers, distributors and exhibitors. With the re-emergence of cinema theatres in Lagos, scholars are yet to articulate how the cinema-going audiences engage with Nollywood films in specific cine-plexes. This paper addresses the nature of a subset of Lagos-based audiences and ways in which they convene at cinema centres, experience a Nollywood film, The CEO (2016), and disperse from the spaces made possible by Lagos cinema operators. A commercially-vibrant city, Lagos is not only the birth place of Nollywood but also the location of a majority of the cinemas in Nigeria. The paper throws up insights on the demographic nature of Lagos cinema-going audiences and their meaning-making habits.