In 2017 we made a movie called My Wife and I, the first of what I’ve started calling my first Omoni trilogy. Staring in that film was Jemima Osunde as Omoni and Ramsey’s rude daughter. Most people saw that performance and wanted to know why she didn’t get slapped (which in a way was part of the point).
I saw that performance and thought leading lady, luckily I ended up being able to do something about it.
In 2017 whilst I was shooting The Wedding Party 2, I was thinking about my next project. I’d been debating what to focus on next and then Toun Odumosu came into my life.
The idea of a young shop girl who became the heir to a multibillion fortune was very compelling. I ended up dropping every other idea to focus on this one.
Once I was done there was only one person who i thought could play Toun Odumosu — Jemima.
I turned out to be right. People loved New Money and her performance in it.
The film ended up in the Top Ten Nollywood Films of the Nigerian Box Office in 2018 and did well across the next window performing well on Netflix, DSTV and Amazon. So yay us.
If you haven’t seen it yet, what are you waiting for.
https://www.netflix.com/ng/title/81172723
Anyhoo — at the end of New Money we added a post credit sting where we put up a tag “Quam will return in New Money 2”
We didn’t really expect to make a sequel, but because of the success of the first one, people kept asking over and over again.
So in 2019, I started thinking about a sequel. I knew that I didn’t want to do a straight sequel because to my mind Toun’s story was generally complete. Since I didn’t want to do that, my focus then shifted to sideways sequels — basically where you continue the story but not necessarily with the original main characters. The most famous recent ones being Force Awakens, Hobbes and Shaw, Batman V Superman.
Once I decided to go down this route there was only one candidate for the story — the fan-favorite character Quam played by Falz. The character was on screen for a total of 15 minutes but people really loved him. So much so that Falz was nominated for (and won) an AMVCA for his portrayal.
It took about 6/7 months to get the story into the right shape and then we were off to the races assembling an amazing cast and crew led by superb director in Kayode Kasum.
As you can see above it’s a sweethe trailer for a sweethe film.
In honor of the release of the sequel, I’m putting up the script for New Money. This is the final script based on the film you saw, not the shooting script, however I chose not to edit the individual scenes so you can see the changes made from script to screen.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/flqeqr7skf287ht/New%20Money_final.pdf?dl=0
Hope you enjoy the script and if you have any questions, feel free to hit me up on twitter or insta and I’ll try to answer.
Laters
