The Black Book Made $1 Million Look Like $10 Million. Old Scores Has the Severance Producer, a BAFTA Cinematographer, and a 300-Person International Crew.
The Black Book grossed 20 million views on Netflix and hit #3 globally in 2023. Editi Effiong spent two years on the sequel. Nicholas Weinstock — Emmy-nominated Severance producer — is now on board. A 300-person international crew. BAFTA winner Yinka Edward on camera. RMD returns. Production wrapped December 5, 2025. This is what serious looks like.
Film · Industry
In September 2023, a Nigerian film made on a one-million-dollar budget hit number three on Netflix’s global charts. It was in the top ten in sixty-nine countries. It accumulated over twenty million views. It starred Richard Mofe-Damijo as Paul Edima, a deacon and former hitman who dismantles a corrupt police network after they frame and kill his son. The film was called The Black Book. The director was Editi Effiong, founder of Anakle Films, making his feature directorial debut.
If you are wondering what Effiong did with the two years that followed that result, the answer is: he built the sequel. Not quickly. Not cheaply. Not in the way that Nigerian film sequels have historically been made, which is to say fast and on the momentum of the original’s goodwill. He spent two years on the script, co-written with Bunmi Ajakaiye. He went looking for partners who understood what the first film had established and what the second one needed to do to not diminish it. He found Nicholas Weinstock.
Nicholas Weinstock is the Emmy-nominated executive producer of Severance, the Apple TV+ psychological thriller that became one of the most discussed prestige television productions of the past three years. His company, Invention Studios, has produced Bridesmaids, Thelma, and Escape at Dannemora. He is, in other words, not a name that attaches itself to projects speculatively. When Weinstock’s name appears on a production, it is because he has read the material and decided it belongs in the conversation he is interested in having.
Weinstock joins Effiong and Anakle Films co-founder Mimi Bartels as producers on The Black Book: Old Scores. The cinematographer is Yinka Edward, who handled the photography on the first film and has since won a BAFTA. David Mosadoluwa takes over production design from the late Pat Nebo, who designed the first film’s world. The crew totalled 300 people, drawn from Nigeria, the UK, the United States, China, and Japan. Principal photography wrapped on December 5, 2025.
Richard Mofe-Damijo returns as Paul Edima. Shaffy Bello is in the cast. Kate Henshaw. Bright Okpocha. New cast members whose characters have not been fully described. The sequel, per Effiong’s own words, “delves deeper into themes of justice, redemption, and societal unrest in contemporary Nigeria” and picks up where Paul Edima’s assault on the corrupt system left off.
No release date has been announced. The film will go to Netflix. The question is not whether it will be distributed. The question is whether a sequel to a film whose global performance surprised everyone, now made with significantly more resources and a Hollywood producing partner, can do what few Nollywood sequels have managed: justify its own existence beyond the commercial opportunity of the original’s numbers.
The Black Book did not succeed because it was a Nigerian action film. It succeeded because it was a well-made film about a specific Nigerian reality — the specific violence of a system that protects itself by destroying the people it is supposed to serve — that happened to be made in Nigeria. Old Scores will be judged on the same terms. The infrastructure is bigger. The standard is the same.
The Black Book: Old Scores — production complete. Dir./Written Editi Effiong · Prod. Anakle Films / Invention Studios · Principal photography wrapped December 5, 2025 · Netflix release TBA.
