Americanah, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s 2013 novel about two Nigerians whose lives unspool across Lagos, New York, and London, has been picked up for screen adaptation by Canal+, the French global media and entertainment company, as part of its “Creating African Stories With Global Resonance” initiative. The announcement was confirmed through Canal+ Group’s 2025 full-year results and strategic update, where Americanah appears alongside other major African-focused projects in development. No format, cast, writer, director, or production timeline has been announced; Canal+ has also not clarified whether its version is connected in any way to the HBO Max production that collapsed in 2020, or is an entirely new creative undertaking.

The novel’s journey toward the screen has been one of the most watched, and repeatedly disappointed, stories in African literary adaptation. In 2014, it was announced that Lupita Nyong’o would star in and produce a film adaptation, with Brad Pitt’s Plan B Entertainment also attached to produce. That version never reached production. In 2019, the project moved to television: HBO Max ordered a 10-episode limited series with Nyong’o still attached to star, and Danai Gurira brought on board as writer and showrunner. That version ended in 2020, when pandemic-era production delays created scheduling conflicts and Nyong’o exited the project. The rights have circled back into development, and Americanah, one of the most acclaimed Nigerian novels of the past twenty years, has been waiting ever since.

The novel won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction in 2013 and was named one of the New York Times Book Review’s Ten Best Books of the year. In 2024, the New York Times ranked it at number 27 on its list of the 100 best books of the 21st century. It follows Ifemelu and Obinze, secondary school sweethearts in Lagos who are separated as they migrate in different directions out of Nigeria, and who find each other again years later, changed by everything the world has done to them in the interim. It is a story about race in America, class and aspiration, the particular loneliness of the immigrant, and what it costs to go back. That it has not yet reached the screen, despite more than a decade of industry interest, is a testament to how difficult the journey between literary recognition and actual production remains, even for the most celebrated African novels.

Canal+’s Americanah sits alongside an ambitious development slate that includes Agoodjie, a project centred on the Women Warriors of Dahomey; The Heist of Benin, which has Ava DuVernay and David Oyelowo attached; and a musical tied to Paul Simon’s Graceland album called The Road Home. The company’s African content push is serious and well-resourced, Canal+ has deep distribution infrastructure across Francophone Africa and a growing footprint on the continent more broadly. Whether that infrastructure and the Americanah IP will finally produce what twelve years of development have not is the question the industry, and Adichie’s considerable global readership, will be watching closely.