Decline in Ghana movie sales, Socrate explains

by Chris Twum
Several reasons have been given as the main cause of the recent heavy decline in the sale of Ghanaian movies. Some of the major reasons given by movie enthusiasts are that, producers constantly use the same old faces in their movies.

For such people, introducing new set of actors would at least help the movie maker to turn things around in their way.

Cross sections of them also think that, perhaps if good stories are produced into movies, the decline in buying of movies wouldn't be discussed now. It is said that, these days, producers find it usual to reproduce movies they had already produced years ago.

This unfortunate trend has been a major concern for movie buyers too. Who wants to use their hard earned cash to purchase same movie with different titles? Very illogical.

Over the years when the cinema culture was still around and very vibrant, even though movie makers by then didn't have or use modern equipment for filming, they had good stories to tackle with their not-so-good or old equipment.

Yet today the table has turned. Film makers now use good equipment for filming bad and stolen stories from other movies.

Whenever you talk to any of the producers concerning those stolen stories, they tell you 'every story has been treated before', but now it appears that they have to find a way to arrest the situation and also convince movie buyers.

Socrate Safo, a movie maker is, however, blaming the decline in movie purchasing to three factors; TV Stations, Piracy and Distribution Channels.

The man who has been nicknamed 'controversial', due to the manner he tackles stories in his movies said the proliferation of television stations is a major hindrance to their growth and contributed to the decline in movie sales in the country.

Back to the cinema culture in those days, the cinema was the only source for many people to watch new movies before they are released on the market. Now all the television stations broadcast movies almost all the time.

According to him, that has prevented people from purchasing the movies, after all they can watch it free on television. He laid special emphasis on the free-to-air-channels as major culprits.

The second reason Socrate gave is the issue with piracy. He talked extensively about how pirates have retarded their progress, continuing that they had lost the war against the pirates.

He said for about fourteen years, they fought the pirates with the same techniques and acknowledged that, they need to change how they operate to fight the pirates.

Talking about the last reason about Distribution Channels, Socrate said: 'We don't have distributors in Ghana, we have shop keepers. People who just take the films and put it in their shops and just sit down somewhere …. and they wait for people to come and buy, they are not distributors'.

He concluded that a proper Distribution Channel has to be put in place to do proper distribution of Ghanaian movies. Ghanacelebrities.com