Veteran Ghanaian filmmaker, Socrate Safo, has placed much of the blame for Ghana’s struggling movie industry on producers who rushed to hand over films to television stations, a decision he believes drained revenue and crippled long-term growth.
Speaking on GhanaWeb Entertainment’s X Space on September 12, 2025, Safo said the oversupply of films to television has left producers unable to recoup their investments or even break even.
“Out of ignorance, we are where we are. What am I going to do with TV? When I go there, it will kill my business. Nobody is listening, and I am tired of talking. Producers are losing money. People go there, produce movies, and cannot break even. It is so frustrating. TV stations have so many films,” he said.
He argued that the glut of movies has made audiences less likely to buy CDs while leaving broadcasters saturated with content they no longer need. Safo recalled that TV3 had once turned away filmmakers because it already had more than enough material. “Ignorance is what has brought us here. TV stations have killed our business,” the filmmaker added.
Turning to cinema, Safo warned that the industry has wrongly treated premieres as a distribution model, further weakening its structure.
“Check the records apart from the night of the premiere, how many films can fill the halls even for three days in Silver Bird. Now, the premier is considered part of the distribution. Premier isn’t part of our main distributions,” he explained.
According to him, cinema hall owners had sounded the alarm years ago about the consequences of dumping films on television, but their warnings went unheeded. “Look at the mentality now, it’s become the norm. Ignorance is what has brought us here. When you meet owners of cinema halls, they will tell you, they don’t understand what is happening right now because they warned us when we started giving our movies to TV stations,” Safo noted.
