Coverage period: 1 January 2026 – 30 June 2026
African Film Press (AFP) is a pan-African screen-sector intelligence alliance formed by Akoroko, Sinema Focus, and What Kept Me Up. It tracks production, financing, distribution, and screen infrastructure across all 54 African countries.
This is AFP's first mid-year statement — a read on where film and television stood across the first half of 2026, and what we expect for the second half, written from an African vantage point.
Time, Money, Access: The Real Fight in Screen Media Right Now
At the halfway point of 2026, the film and television problem is no longer only a production problem, a distribution problem, or a platform problem. It is a capacity problem — a fight for the viewer's time, money, and attention, all three squeezed at once. This is African Film Press's read on where that fight stands worldwide, including across African screen sectors.
Audiences are not only choosing between films and TV shows. They're choosing between films, series, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, WhatsApp, email, podcasts, games, and newsletters, with work notifications and family obligations pulling at them the whole time. Every film or series now enters the world as one more claim on a person's day, competing with everything else already fighting for that same time.
The audience is already stretched thin before the film is even released
Audiences aren't bored and waiting for something good to watch. The catchall "content" category has swallowed plenty in the 2020s: entertainment, work, friendship, family logistics, news, politics, advertising, and self-presentation. A two-minute message and a two-hour film aren't the same kind of ask, but they're competing for time in the same hour.
Deloitte's 2025 Digital Media Trends report found that U.S. consumers were already spending an average of six hours a day on media and entertainment, and that number was not growing. The same report placed social video, creators, user-generated video, gaming, podcasts, and streaming in direct competition for that fixed daily window.
Africa has its own version of the same problem
In the U.S., the problem is too much choice. In many African markets, the problem is excess and scarcity at once. There is plenty of digital noise, and access is genuinely uneven from one country to the next.
GSMA's Mobile Economy Africa 2026 report found that mobile technologies and services contributed $240 billion to Africa's economy in 2025 (7.8% of GDP) and supported an estimated 13 million jobs, with that contribution projected to reach $290 billion by 2030. For a large part of Africa, the phone is the first and often only point of contact with entertainment, payment, news, and daily communication, all sharing the same device and the same stretch of time.
But access on paper doesn't automatically turn into viewing. South Africa's National Film and Video Foundation surveyed 379 people across all nine provinces in 2026 and found that 78.6% said local content was easy to find and 76% said they'd pay for it. What people actually did tells a different story: local films took just 0.9% of South African box-office gross in 2023, and 79.6% of respondents said they'd either stopped going to the cinema or hadn't been in more than six months. NFVF attributes the gap to perceived production polish, weak marketing, inconsistent quality, and low audience trust — a diagnosis the research never actually tests. Even where audiences say they can find local work and would pay for it, time and money still go somewhere else first.
The streaming era sells endless choice. Now that choice feels like work: deciding what's actually worth paying for. The viewer isn't only tired. The viewer is price-sensitive, and less willing to treat every new release as an event worth clearing space for.
That's the capacity problem on the African side of it too: not a lack of access on paper, but the same daily competition for a limited hour, playing out against a different set of facts.
The creator economy is a direct competitor, not a side category
The creator economy has become a parallel entertainment system, with its own stars, formats, advertising market, and rules. Market research firms put its current size at roughly $250 billion in 2026, growing at more than 20% a year. Deloitte separately estimates a worldwide creator base of about 50 million people producing content for some five billion social media users.
For film and TV, that changes the math. A filmmaker no longer competes only with another filmmaker. A producer no longer competes only with another producer. Both compete with creators who post daily, speak directly to an audience, react to the news cycle in real time, and build audience trust without a studio, broadcaster, cinema chain, or festival behind them.
Strategy now has to begin before production
In 2026, finishing a film and worrying about the audience afterward is riskier than it used to be. That does not mean every project should chase trends or shape itself entirely around what an algorithm rewards. It means the producer has to know, early, who the work is for, where that audience already spends time, what language they use when they talk about the subject, and what existing habit the project can connect to. Is this a cinema title, a streaming title, a festival title, a YouTube-native idea, a short-form campaign, a book or IP adaptation, or some combination? What does the audience need before release day so they aren't hearing about the work for the first time?
There's less money available, so producers need a clearer audience argument
As buyers pull back, streamers reduce risk, festivals face budget pressure, grants become more competitive, and broadcasters protect limited budgets, the producer's job changes. Canal+ and MultiChoice's decision to shut down Showmax this year, after more than $300 million invested in it, is one sign of that same contraction on the African side. The pitch has to do more than say "this is a good story." It has to explain why this story can reach a defined public in a crowded field.
That is especially true for independent African work. The filmmaker may still need grants, festival access, or broadcaster interest, but each needs a sharper argument for who the audience is.
AFP's place in this
This is the environment African Film Press is working in and built its tools for. AFP addresses the capacity problem with journalism, intelligence, research, and internal tracking to monitor projects, funding routes, release activity, infrastructure changes, and market movement over time.
Not all of that work is currently public. The AFP Co-Production Treaty Registry and the Streaming & Infrastructure Watch are widely accessible. The AFP Pipeline Registry, the Funding Desk, and the Distribution Registry are subscriber-only tools. The Pipeline Registry tracks African and diaspora projects from script development through completion, before they reach a premiere. The Funding Desk catalogs financing instruments (grants, rebates, equity, co-production mechanisms) across Africa's 54 countries and offers a roadmap for the user to build a financing plan. The Distribution Registry picks up after a title has premiered: its sales agent, its territory-by-territory deals, and its status in the market.
Across those uses, the purpose is the same: verify what exists, record movement, and keep African screen activity easier to identify, assess, and track over time.
These are the gaps that AFP's work is directed toward. And for the second half of 2026, the work continues.
For the Rest of 2026...
A market does not become stronger because more titles enter it. It becomes stronger when those titles can move, earn, be discussed, and stay visible long enough to build value. That is the difference between activity and structure. Audiences only have so much time and money, so which titles reach them depends on the structure around those titles. AFP's work is concerned with structure.
The viewer is not an abstract category. Viewers have routines, prices they will accept, devices they use, languages they prefer, platforms they trust, and habits that are hard to change. African screen work has to be understood in relation to those habits. The sector's next challenge is to weave the work into the very fabric of people's regular cultural life.
The future of African screen sectors will not be decided by production volume alone. It will also be decided by payment systems, broadband quality, cinema access, telecom pricing, copyright enforcement, national film funds, broadcaster behavior, platform licensing, and local distribution capacity.
African Film Press (AFP) will continue tracking the conditions that determine whether the systems around the work are serious enough to match the ambition of the people making it.
Working With AFP
AFP engages with partners and institutions through subscriptions, commissioned research, advisory and briefing work, and institutional access arrangements including data licensing and custom reporting.
Editorial Independence & Disclosures
AFP's editorial decisions operate independently of partners, funders, and advertisers. Commissioned research and advisory work are conducted separately from editorial coverage. AFP discloses relevant relationships when applicable and does not operate a pay-to-publish model.
Contact
Primary contact: Tambay A. Obenson, CEO, Co-founder
General contact: info@africanfilmpress.com
Website: www.africanfilmpress.com