When Severance producer Nicky Weinstock picks up the phone for a new project, it tends to travel. This time, the call has landed in Lagos.
Weinstock has signed on to produce The Black Book 2 – Old Scores, the sequel to Editi Effiong’s breakout Nigerian action thriller, a film that quietly rewrote assumptions about what a $1mn production from west Africa could achieve on a global platform.
The original The Black Book, released on Netflix in 2023, was made on a modest budget but performed with outsized force. It climbed to No 3 on the streamer’s global chart, entered the top 10 in 69 countries and amassed more than 20mn views. At its centre was Richard Mofe-Damijo’s Paul Edima, a former hitman turned church deacon who returns to violence after his son is framed and killed by a corrupt police unit.
The sequel resumes where that reckoning left off. Paul Edima is not done. Nor, it seems, is Effiong. The new instalment promises to push further into questions of justice, redemption and social fracture in contemporary Nigeria, themes that gave the first film its moral edge beneath the gunfire.
Weinstock’s involvement signals something more than a routine sequel. Through his Los Angeles-based Invention Studios, he has built a track record that moves between indie features and prestige television. His credits range from the Emmy-nominated prison drama Escape at Dannemora to Apple TV+’s dystopian corporate saga Severance, which has collected 53 Emmy nominations. His film work includes Thelma (2024), Queenpins (2021) and Dinner in America (2020).
In backing Old Scores, Weinstock appears to be betting on a franchise rather than a one-off success. He describes the original Black Book as more than a slick action picture, instead, as the foundation for a series with “extraordinary skill, ambition and worldwide commercial appeal”. For international producers, Africa is increasingly less a territory to licence from and more a market to build with.
Effiong frames the sequel in similar terms. The first film, he argues, demonstrated that “local stories can spark global conversations”. The second is positioned not just as continuation but escalation, creatively and symbolically. In a global streaming economy that rewards distinct voices, Nigeria’s film industry, long prolific but undercapitalised, is learning to convert cultural reach into structured franchises.
This is not Weinstock’s first Nigerian venture. He is also producing Clarissa, a contemporary Nigerian-set adaptation of Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, directed by Arie and Chuko Esiri and starring Sophie Okonedo, David Oyelowo and Ayo Edebiri. The film has been picked up for US distribution by Neon, another indication that Nigerian-set stories are no longer confined to niche circuits.
For Lagos’ creative class, The Black Book 2 arrives at a moment of confidence. Nigerian cinema has long dominated African box offices and diasporic markets. What streaming has changed is scale — and speed. A film once destined for regional acclaim can now surface in São Paulo, Seoul or Stockholm within days.
Sequels are, by definition, about unfinished business. For Paul Edima, that business is personal. For Nigeria’s film industry, it may be structural: proving that the leap from breakout hit to sustainable franchise is not an exception, but a model.
