Multimodal Discourse Analysis of NOLLYWOOD Film Posters and Their Audience Reception in Lagos

Film posters are a multimodal communicative genre that combines visual, typographic, and verbal sign systems to construct meaning, position audiences, and market cultural products, and the genre conventions of Nollywood poster design encode culturally specific assumptions about audience, genre, and filmic value. This study applies multimodal discourse analysis to Nollywood film posters, examining the semiotic resources deployed to construct meaning and then investigating how Lagos audiences actually receive and interpret these meanings. A corpus of one hundred Nollywood film posters released between 2021 and 2024 was assembled and analysed using Kress and Van Leeuwen's social semiotic framework, examining image act, gaze, social distance, salience, framing, and information structure across the multimodal ensemble. Quantitative coding identified dominant compositional patterns and inter-genre variation between action, comedy, drama, and religious film categories. The corpus analysis was complemented by reception research involving eye-tracking experiments with twenty participants and retrospective verbal protocols with the same participants, examining attention distribution and meaning-making processes. Multimodal analysis identifies genre-specific poster conventions including the use of split-focal protagonist arrangements in action posters and the deployment of high-frontal angle for religious authority figures in gospel film posters. Reception research reveals significant divergence between compositional salience and participant visual attention, with participants systematically attending to faces before text regardless of compositional positioning. Theoretical implications for multimodal semiotics and implications for Nollywood marketing practice are discussed. Keywords: multimodal discourse analysis, Nollywood, film posters, audience reception, semiotic analysis.