On a humid evening in Accra or Kumasi, it is common to find living rooms filled with families hanging on the latest episode of a Twi telenovela—domestic drama, moral dilemmas and cliffhangers delivered in the language of the living room.
The genre’s popularity has sparked a heated debate: are these serialized programs crowding out local cinema, collapsing the film industry that once aspired to theatrical production and international festival visibility? The question captures a real tension.
Twi telenovelas are both symptom and engine of change: they reflect shifting audience preferences and business realities while reshaping how stories are funded, produced, and consumed. Understanding the effects requires separating genuine threats from growing pains and recognizing the policy and market choices that will determine whether this transformation leads to collapse or renewal.
Actress Martha Ankomah has raised serious concerns about the heavy presence of Twi-dubbed telenovelas on many local TV stations, saying it is hurting the local film industry.
According to her, the constant showing of these foreign soap operas throughout the day is pushing Ghanaian films off the screen.
“It’s one of the main reasons why our industry is collapsing. They show it in the morning, in the afternoon, in the evening… sometimes you wake up around 3am and they are still showing us.”
Martha Ankomah
Ankomah explained that Ghanaian filmmakers create jobs and help grow the economy, but their work is often ignored by TV stations in favour of foreign shows.
She called on the government to step in and support the local industry. “Because you go to a TV station and you want to promote your project, trust me, they don’t have sponsors for local projects. But I bet you they have sponsorships for the foreign TV crews,” she revealed.
Filmmakers like Ivan Quashigah claim that the dominance of Twinovelas on television has led to very low patronage of Kumawood films. When viewers prefer the translated foreign soaps, they are less inclined to watch local productions.
Mr Beautiful, a Kumawood actor, also publicly voiced that as many TV stations license foreign content dubbed into Twi, audiences tune into those shows instead of local films, thus causing the collapse (or at least steep decline) of parts of the Ghanaian movie industry.
Several structural dynamics explain why telenovelas have had such a disruptive effect. They meet a clear market demand: affordable, frequent, language-accessible entertainment with characters and situations audiences recognize.
Broadcasters and advertisers prize them because they reliably deliver mass viewership in prime time, making them a lucrative revenue source.
Their production economics differ fundamentally from theatrical filmmaking: telenovelas favor volume, speed, and lower per-minute production costs, while theatrical films require higher up-front investments, longer production schedules, and uncertain box-office returns.
The combination of profitable television slots, quicker production cycles, and distribution reach has redirected capital, talent and attention away from higher-budget filmmaking.
Producers who might have attempted a theatrical film instead take the safer route of serialized television; actors and crew gravitate toward more stable, recurring employment in series; and advertisers direct budgets to TV time rather than sponsoring film projects.
For cinemas, which were already challenged by infrastructure costs and limited screens, the pull of a satisfied television audience mean fewer ticket sales and a harder case for theatrical premieres.
Twi Telenovela Costs to Film Culture and Industry Capacity
These trends produce several damaging consequences. The emphasis on quantity and rapid turnaround often reduces production values, narrative innovation and technical craft in the broader ecosystem.
A market saturated with formulaic serials limit audience appetite for riskier, art-house or genre films that need time and marketing to find their viewers. The talent pipeline—writers, directors, cinematographers—become specialized toward the demands of serialized television, leaving fewer practitioners capable of executing feature films at scale.
The market’s consolidation around TV advertising and broadcaster commissioning creates gatekeeping effects: a handful of decision-makers determine which stories get financed, possibly narrowing cultural pluralism.
Despite these real threats, “collapse” overstates the case. Twi telenovelas are not simply competition; they also expand the overall cultural economy.
They normalize and valorize storytelling in a local language, enlarging audiences who value indigenous narratives and who are cultivated to appreciate diverse formats.
The visible success of telenovelas draws more people into the creative workforce—writers, actors, editors—many of whom are trained and supported to work across formats.
Moreover, serialized television serve as incubators for talent and ideas: successful story arcs or characters are adapted into feature films, and episodic storytelling act as proof-of-concept when seeking grants or co-productions.
Telenovelas also open new distribution possibilities. Digital platforms, satellite television and social media give Twi-language content a reach beyond national borders, connecting diasporic audiences and creating export markets.
This cross-border appeal attracts partnerships and funding that benefit both serial and feature production. With the right structures—intellectual property protection, revenue sharing, and training—telenovelas become a financial base that supports riskier, higher-quality films.
To avoid a decline in theatrical and cinematic film production while retaining the benefits of Twi telenovelas, stakeholders should pursue a mix of policy, investment and market-driven strategies.
Twi telenovelas are a powerful force in contemporary Ghanaian and West African cultural life. Their immediacy, linguistic intimacy and commercial logic have reshaped the local media landscape, displacing some traditional film industry patterns and posing clear risks to theatrical filmmaking.
However, rather than signaling terminal collapse, the rise of Twi serials represents a pivot point: an opportunity to reinvent financing, distribution, training and exhibition to accommodate both the mass appeal of serialized television and the artistic aspirations of cinema.
With deliberate policy choices and cooperative industry strategies, the energy and audiences that Twi telenovelas have mobilized are harnessed to build a more diverse, resilient and thriving local film ecosystem.
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