Back in May, Brittle Paper reported that Booker Prize-shortlisted novelist Chigozie Obioma had stepped into an entirely new role: movie producer. His debut credit, the Nollywood romcom Call of My Life, opened to nearly ₦80 million in its first week. Three months later, the film has turned into something far bigger than a strong opening.

Distributor Film One announced this week that Call of My Life has crossed ₦837 million at the Nigerian box office, making it the highest-grossing BluHouse Studios production, the highest-grossing romcom, the highest-grossing May release, and the highest-grossing release of 2026 so far, while also setting new records for admissions and for a filmmaker’s debut feature. In a statement, Film One thanked audiences for turning what it called a beautiful film into a historic one, and congratulated the film’s stars, Uzoamaka Power and Andrew Bunting, alongside producer Blessing Uzzi.

The numbers close the loop on what Obioma told Brittle Paper back in May, when he described his motivation for joining the project: a long-standing ambition to push Nigerian filmmaking past its reliance on slapstick and melodrama, paired with his admiration for Uzzi’s work and Uzoamaka Power’s script. He’d called the finished film “perhaps the best Nigerian film I have seen in a very long time, if ever”, a claim that, five months and ₦837 million later, looks less like enthusiasm and more like a fairly accurate read of the room.

At ₦837 million, the film is closing in on, but hasn’t yet crossed, the ₦1 billion mark. worth noting, since Nollywood’s box office conversation has increasingly used that threshold as its own kind of milestone. Still, every superlative Film One listed stands on its own without needing the round number: highest-grossing Nollywood film of 2026 is, on its own terms, a remarkable outcome for a first-time producer whose day job is writing literary fiction.

Obioma’s success reinforces a pattern Brittle Paper flagged back in May: Nigeria’s literary and film industries are beginning to collaborate more deliberately, and Call of My Life‘s numbers suggest that collaboration is paying off commercially as well as creatively.