Silverbird Accra Mall Ranks as Anglophone West Africa’s Second Highest-Attended Cinema in 2025

FilmOne's 2025 Nigeria Box Office Yearbook offers one of the clearest data points yet in Ghana's long-running cinema audience debate.

For years, the debate in Ghana's film industry has circled the same question: does Ghana have a cinema audience strong enough to support theatrical growth?

The answers have often been unreliable and unscientific: cautious optimism from filmmakers, skepticism from investors, and very little data to settle either position.

FilmOne Entertainment’s 2025 Nigeria Box Office Yearbook now offers one of the clearest data points yet.

According to the yearbook, Silverbird Accra Mall, operated by Nigerian-owned cinema chain Silverbird Cinemas, ranked as the second highest-attended cinema in Anglophone West Africa in 2025.

The cinema recorded 153,778 admissions, behind only Silverbird Ikeja in Lagos, which led the regional table with 216,857 admissions.

By box office revenue, Silverbird Accra Mall ranked fourth in the region, generating ₦964,835,310, approximately GHS 8 million or $709,805, from FilmOne-distributed titles.

The data is significant because it places a cinema located in Ghana ahead of several major Nigerian venues across Lagos, Abuja, Rivers, Edo, Oyo and other markets, including cinemas operated by FilmHouse, Genesis, Viva, Kada and independent operators.

The footprint behind the number

The yearbook tracks 122 cinema locations that collectively generated ₦15.6 billion, approximately GHS 129.3 million or $11.5 million, in regional box office revenue in 2025, representing a 48% year-on-year increase alongside a 17% expansion in cinema count.

Of those 122 locations, 119 are in Nigeria.

Ghana has three: Silverbird Accra Mall with six screens in Greater Accra, Silverbird West Hills Mall with five screens in Greater Accra, and Golden Eagle Cinemas with four screens in Kumasi. Liberia has one location.

It is important to note that FilmOne’s cinema locations are not a census of every screen in Ghana. They reflect the cinemas connected to FilmOne’s first-run theatrical distribution pipeline: the network delivering new releases that drive box office revenue.

Based on SCORE’s own research, Ghana has approximately 19 active cinema screens in total. Fifteen of those are inside FilmOne’s distribution footprint. The remaining screens operate outside that pipeline, screening older or second-run titles rather than regular first-run releases.

This places Ghana’s cinema market in a difficult position.

The country has a limited screen footprint overall, but it also has an even smaller number of screens connected to a major first-run distribution network.

That means Ghana’s theatrical challenge is not only about building new cinemas. It is also about connecting existing screens to distribution networks that can bring regular first-run titles to audiences.

Silverbird Accra Mall’s performance supports this point. Despite Ghana’s small screen footprint, one well-positioned Accra cinema performed at a regional top-five level in both admissions and box office.

Based on this data, building new cinemas is one part of the answer. Connecting existing screens to first-run distribution networks may be the faster and more immediate intervention.

One cinema stands out. 

Of Ghana’s three FilmOne-distributed locations, only Silverbird Accra Mall appears in the yearbook’s Top 25 rankings for both admissions and box office.

Silverbird West Hills Mall and Golden Eagle Cinemas in Kumasi do not appear in either table.

That gap raises questions the data cannot fully answer yet.

Is Silverbird Accra Mall’s performance a function of location, mall footfall, programming, marketing, purchasing power, or the concentration of cinema-going culture in parts of Accra?

Most likely, it is a combination of these factors. But the industry does not currently have enough public data to know for certain, which is itself part of the problem.

What the data does establish is that Silverbird Accra Mall is not simply performing well by Ghanaian standards. It is competing with the strongest cinema locations in the region.

That should shift the conversation.

The issue may not be that Ghanaians are unwilling to go to the cinema. The issue may be that Ghana has too few connected, well-programmed, well-marketed cinema spaces for that demand to fully show itself.

Every audience Ghana cannot serve because of limited screens, limited programming slots or limited distribution access is potential revenue the film economy does not capture.

And every Ghanaian film that cannot secure meaningful theatrical placement faces the same problem: not necessarily that no one would watch it, but that there may be too few places for audiences to watch it properly.

What the Ghanaian film numbers say

Ghanaian films released 23 titles into this market in 2025, generating ₦88.8 million, approximately GHS 736,000 or $65,300, across 9,375 admissions.

The Fisherman led Ghanaian releases with 2,213 admissions, followed by A Country Called Ghana, Kiss Too Late and Last Stop.

These are not the numbers of an industry without an audience.

They are the numbers of an industry working within a bottleneck: making films, finding audiences, and still operating inside a limited theatrical system.

Silverbird Accra Mall’s 2025 performance does not solve Ghana’s cinema problem. But it does something immediately useful: it challenges the wrong diagnosis.

The question was never simply whether Ghana has a cinema audience but whether Ghana is ready to build the infrastructure, distribution access and programming culture required to meet that audience.

Ghana’s cinema audience is definitely not absent. It is just constrained.

Source: Nigeria Box Office Yearbook 2025, FilmOne Entertainment.
Available at https://online.fliphtml5.com/ogfbg/abpz/#p=25