Behind The Scenes Review: The Film That Broke Every Record Does Not Disappoint on the Small Screen

The ₦2.76 billion conversation has been so large and so sustained that it has almost obscured the film inside it. Now that Behind The Scenes is on Netflix and accessible to the audience that did not see it in cinemas, the question worth answering is not what it earned but what it is. The answer is that it is the best-constructed mainstream Nollywood comedy of the past decade, and it earned every naira.

Scarlet Gomez plays Aderonke “Ronky-feller” Faniran — a wealthy woman who decides, after reaching her limit with the family and friends who take her generosity as their birthright, to fake her own death and watch what happens. What happens is the film. The design of the premise is elegant in the specific way that good comedy-drama premises are elegant: it creates a situation in which the protagonist has total information and everyone around her has none, which means every scene she is in has a second layer of irony that the audience shares with her and the other characters cannot see.

Gomez carries that asymmetry with a lightness that is not easy to achieve. The role asks her to be simultaneously the most powerless character in the room — she cannot reveal herself, cannot respond to what is happening to her memory, cannot intervene when she wants to — and the most powerful, because she knows what none of them know. The performance navigates that contradiction without ever overselling either element. She is funny when the script requires it and quietly devastating when it doesn’t, sometimes within the same scene.

The ensemble around her is a roll call of working Nollywood talent used exactly as well as it should be. Funke Akindele as the entitled older sister is doing the kind of comedic villain work that only an actor with complete technical confidence can pull off without tipping into caricature. Tobi Bakre’s spoiled lastborn is calibrated precisely to the specific Lagos energy of a man who has never been told no. Toyin Abraham’s scene-work hits every beat it is supposed to hit. Iyabo Ojo appears in a role that is shorter than you might expect and does more with it than most of the cast does with twice the screen time.

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The film is two hours and change and it does not feel like two hours. That is a directorial achievement that does not get discussed enough in the conversation about its commercial performance. Akindele and Olaoye edited their own film’s rhythm as carefully as they edited its tone, and the result is a mainstream Nigerian comedy that trusts its audience to stay with a story rather than demanding that it be distracted by the next scene before it has finished with the current one.

On Netflix it arrives with the advantage of already being understood as significant. Watch it. The reputation is earned.

Behind The Scenes — now streaming on Netflix. Dir. Funke Akindele & Tunde Olaoye · FilmOne Studios · Released in cinemas December 12, 2025.