When Burna Boy‘s face flashed across giant screens at Paris’ Stade de France in front of 80,000 fans earlier this year, it wasn’t promoting his next album—it was a trailer for a revenge thriller called “3 Cold Dishes.“ The moment crystallized a seismic shift quietly reshaping African cinema: the continent’s biggest cultural exports are no longer waiting for Western gatekeepers to validate their stories. Instead, they’re bankrolling them. With a $1 million budget—substantial by African standards—and a calculated release strategy that bypassed Lagos for London, “3 Cold Dishes” represents a new breed of African filmmaking: commercially ambitious, diaspora-focused, and unapologetically mainstream. As streaming platforms saturate and festival circuits stagnate, a critical question emerges: Can African cinema finally build a sustainable, profit-driven industry by borrowing the playbook that made Afrobeats a global phenomenon—or will the quest for commercial viability compromise the very authenticity that makes these stories worth telling?
The Economic Reality of African Cinema
The numbers tell a story that African filmmakers have been reluctant to confront for decades. While the continent produces thousands of films annually—Nigeria’s Nollywood alone churns out approximately 2,500 titles per year—the overwhelming majority generate minimal revenue beyond local video-on-demand platforms and informal distribution networks. The traditional pathway to international recognition has required African directors to court European film festivals, tailor narratives to appeal to Western sensibilities about poverty and hardship, and accept that commercial success would remain perpetually out of reach. This model has produced critically acclaimed work, but it has failed to build the industrial infrastructure necessary for a thriving, self-sustaining film economy.
A Calculated Departure from Tradition
“3 Cold Dishes” signals a deliberate departure from this paradigm. The film’s $1 million budget—modest by Hollywood standards but substantial within the African context—represents a calculated wager that African stories can command mainstream audiences and generate returns without compromising their cultural specificity. Directed by Asurf Oluseyi and executive produced through Burna Boy’s Spaceship Films, the production deployed CinemaScope technology and multi-territory theatrical ambitions typically reserved for films backed by major studios. The financial implications are significant: if a commercially oriented African film can recoup its investment and turn a profit through theatrical distribution across 26 African countries plus diaspora markets in France, the United States, and Canada, it establishes a replicable model that could attract private capital and reduce dependency on grant funding.
Strategic Geography and Pan-African Positioning
The strategic geography of the film’s release reveals a sophisticated understanding of how contemporary African content must position itself to achieve commercial viability. The decision to hold the world premiere in London on October 3, 2025—a full month before opening the Africa International Film Festival in Lagos on November 2—was not logistical convenience but calculated branding. By premiering outside Nigeria despite being produced by Nigerian talent, the filmmakers deliberately framed “3 Cold Dishes” as pan-African rather than nationally bound. This positioning matters enormously in a fragmented market where audiences across the continent have historically consumed primarily their own national cinema. A film that can transcend these borders and appeal to viewers in Nigeria, Benin, and Côte d’Ivoire simultaneously unlocks exponentially larger revenue potential.
Linguistic Accessibility as Market Expansion
The production’s bilingual approach—incorporating both English and French dialogue—reinforces this pan-African commercial strategy. Linguistic accessibility has long been a barrier to cross-border distribution in African cinema, with Francophone and Anglophone markets operating as largely separate ecosystems. By designing the film to move seamlessly between both linguistic worlds, the creators are effectively doubling their addressable audience. This is not artistic experimentation; it is market expansion. The move signals that African filmmakers are beginning to think about their work not as cultural artifacts meant for festival curation, but as commercial products designed to maximize reach and revenue.
The Afrobeats Model Applied to Cinema
What makes this economic pivot particularly noteworthy is its financing source. Burna Boy’s involvement represents something more significant than celebrity vanity project. The Afrobeats star brings not just capital but an entire commercial infrastructure: established distribution relationships with global promoters, direct access to diaspora audiences through his touring network, and a demonstrated ability to monetize African cultural products in Western markets without creative compromise. When he deployed his platform to promote “3 Cold Dishes” at venues like the Stade de France, he was leveraging a marketing channel that traditional film distributors cannot access. This cross-pollination between the music and film industries suggests a emerging model where African musicians—having cracked the code for global commercial success—use their resources and networks to pull cinema along the same trajectory.
Breaking the Catch-22
The broader implications of this approach extend beyond a single film. For decades, African cinema has been caught in a Catch-22: unable to attract commercial investment because the infrastructure for profitable distribution didn’t exist, and unable to build that infrastructure without capital investment. The Afrobeats industry broke this cycle by creating its own distribution channels, cultivating diaspora audiences, and proving that African cultural products could generate substantial revenue in Western markets while maintaining artistic integrity. If musicians like Burna Boy can apply that same logic to film—using their existing platforms, credibility, and financial resources to bootstrap a commercially viable cinema industry—it could fundamentally alter the economics that have constrained African filmmaking for generations.
The Authenticity-Commerce Tension
Yet this commercial revolution carries inherent tensions. The very authenticity that makes African stories distinctive—their specificity, their refusal to cater to Western expectations, their willingness to explore complexity and contradiction—could be threatened by an excessive focus on commercial viability and mainstream appeal. The festival circuit, for all its limitations, has historically provided African filmmakers with creative freedom to tell challenging, unconventional stories that might not generate blockbuster revenues. If commercial considerations begin dictating narrative choices, there is a risk that African cinema could sacrifice the very qualities that distinguish it in a globalized media landscape.
Thematic Subversion in Commercial Packaging
The thematic choices in “3 Cold Dishes” suggest the filmmakers are acutely aware of this tension. By focusing on intra-African sex trafficking—depicting exploitation that occurs between African countries rather than the familiar Africa-to-Europe trafficking narrative—the film resists the simplistic storylines that have traditionally appealed to international audiences. This is a story about African agency, both in victimization and in revenge, that refuses to position Europe or the West as either savior or primary destination. It is commercially ambitious without being pandering, mainstream in its thriller mechanics but subversive in its geographic and political framing.
The Future of African Cinema
Whether this balance can be maintained as the commercial stakes increase remains the central question facing African cinema’s economic transformation. The success or failure of “3 Cold Dishes” will be measured not just in box office receipts but in what it demonstrates about the viability of a new model: one where African filmmakers retain creative control, generate sustainable profits, and build the industrial infrastructure necessary for long-term growth. If this experiment succeeds, it could inaugurate an era where African cinema is no longer defined by its relationship to Western festivals and funders, but by its ability to sustain itself through commercial appeal to African and diaspora audiences. If it fails, it may reinforce the perception that African stories—no matter how compelling—cannot escape the economic constraints that have limited the continent’s film industries for decades.
Broader Implications for African Creative Industries
The stakes extend beyond cinema. African creative industries across music, fashion, literature, and visual arts are watching to see whether the commercial breakthrough achieved by Afrobeats can be replicated in other mediums. “3 Cold Dishes” is a test case for whether cultural authenticity and commercial viability can coexist—whether African creators can build profitable, sustainable industries without sacrificing the distinctive perspectives that make their work vital. As the film rolls out across 26 countries in the coming months, it will provide crucial data about audience appetite, distribution feasibility, and the economic realities of pan-African content creation. The answer to these questions will shape not just the future of African cinema, but the broader trajectory of how African stories are financed, distributed, and valued in a global marketplace that has historically marginalized them.
