Yahoo+

A bar job in Asaba talked him out of becoming a Yahoo Boy.

Ebuka Njoku has said the first spark for Yahoo+ was not a treatment meeting. It was a bar in Asaba in 2019, during a break from Nollywood, where he overheard Yahoo Boys talk shop. Open Country Mag has him putting it plainer. He had already given up once. Lost, he tried "yahoo" himself and got told to focus on learning the trade instead of making money. That, he said, is when easy money looked like a delusion. latestnetflix.com's take is that he was also scared of the next step, the one the street calls yahoo plus.Ritual work. The film is that fear, written down.,

Pulse Nigeria dated the cinema opening to 1 July 2022 through FilmOne. The crime story sits in Enugu and runs less than a day. Childhood friends Ose and Abacha cannot break into Nollywood, so they hustle internet fraud. A Hong Kong voice named Mansa offers them the upgrade. The catch is ritual killing. Friends turn on each other. Keezyto plays Ose. Somadina Adinma is Abacha. Ken Erics is Ikolo. Echelon Mbadiwe is Kamso. Ifeoma Obinwa is Pino-Pino. Lorenzo Menakaya, who co-produced, plays Mansa.

Njoku shot one long take per scene, natural light, six people. He told interviewers he knew a first feature would not get every naira in Lagos, so he trapped the story in one house. Menakaya told Open Country Mag the preproduction budget felt like a lot, then the money vanished before principal photography. They went back to the executive producer and leaned on friends in the crew. Njoku later said Ken Erics was not his first choice, or his second. The first four names fell through. Menakaya pushed Erics. The gun grab in the room sold the director.,

Festivals first. Netflix a year late.

The film premiered at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, then picked up Best Narrative Feature and Best Actress for Mbadiwe at the Eastern Nigeria International Film Festival. Coal City and The Annual Film Mischief in Lagos followed. A lack of funds, they said, killed a proper international festival tour. Small distributors lowballed them. A chance meeting with FilmOne's Moses Babatope put it in cinemas. Wikipedia still folds the Netflix date into 1 July 2022. Afrocritik, writing in July 2023, said the digital debut was 21 July 2023. That is the version that matches the theatrical year.,,

Once it streamed, Open Country Mag called it a Netflix No. 1 hit in Nigeria. IMDb users have been colder, parking it around 3.5. Njoku told Afrocritik he might have the theory of yahoo plus wrong, and that he still wanted people to question what they think the slang means. He also told Open Country the Flavour and Umu Obiligbo song "Isi Onwe" locked the story because you do not know the cost of an adventure until it is too late. The official trailer, posted in 2021, already asked whether money ritual is real or just the movies they grew up on.,,,