Ikorodu Bois; the ingenious movie re-making teenagers from Nigeria

Ikorodu Bois; the ingenious movie re-making teenagers from Nigeria.

Truly a man’s gift maketh a way for him. This has been proven over and over, and just recently, a trio of two teenagers and their older sibling with the name Ikorodu Bois, a Nigerian internet group who recreate, and mimic multi-million dollar music videos and Hollywood trailers, made headlines with their re-enactment of Netflix action thriller, ‘Extraction 2′.

In 24 hours, the video garnered four million views and captured the attention of the director and star actor, Chris Hemsworth, also earning them an invite to the world premiere of Netflix action thriller, ‘Extraction 2.′

The brothers, Babatunde Sanni, 23, Muiz Sanni,16, Malik Sanni, 10; and their cousin Fawas Aina, 13 who all live in Ikorodu town simply decided to fashion their group name after their locale. Sanni, who is the most senior of the trio and driving force behind the group, said they converted Muiz’s Instagram handle to the group’s name Ikorodu Bois and began by translating cartoon videos into Yoruba language, before delving into the art of mimicking.

With Kanye West video as the first mimicked work of the bois, they followed up with Dj Cuppy and before you coud say ‘hey Naija’, what started as just fun began to garner followership and today the story is different, as the bois have become stars.

“We started out with viral videos and we kept upgrading our contents from viral videos to music videos to movie trailers. The next one, no one knows, probably a Hollywood film and not a trailer.” Sanni averred.

Very ambitious kids who seem to have their premises clear, their parents initially had reservations about their activities on social media and understandably so, but after seeing the reactions to their works and also knowing they were not on the immoral lane, their parents threw their support in and today the family is the better for it, with bigger prospects ahead.

On the challenges they have while re-enacting videos, Sanni disclosed; “one of the challenges we face is the fact that we have to re-enact videos, shot for shot. When we are working on a particular video, we shoot it scene by scene.

“When we started, there was a time when we  re-enacted Dj Cuppy’s video, that video put us on the line. After DJ Cuppy released a video of her dancing to her song in Epe, one of them, Malik, mimicked her and it was hilarious. It was after this we shot the video. We felt very honoured and happy when we met DJ Cuppy at the Rhythm Unplugged event last year; she was surprised when she saw us perform at the event. She even reposted the recent video we did about her family on her birthday”.

“The first one we did two years back put us on the line, people started getting familiar with the name, but now, people are getting familiar with the name internationally and people want to see what the Ikorodu Bois do internationally. That’s why we do international videos now as well as local videos.”

With there-enactment of “Extraction 2” seemingly the game-changer for the group, their dream just came true, as Chris Hemsworth and his crew couldn’t help noticing the creativity of the bois, which also earned them international recognition with an invite to Extraction 2 premiere.

“Our aim and target for making the extraction video was to make Chris Hemsworth and his crew notice our creativity. Immediately we saw Hemworth’s tweet we were extremely happy because it what we’ve been waiting for all our lives.” Sanni said.

After watching “Extraction” on Netflix, the bois loved the movie which was one of the top 10 Netflix movies at the time and decided to re-enact the video.

Shooting the video was not an easy job according to Sanni “ we have been shooting the “Ëxtraction” video since June. This took us approximately one month, and some days to tidy up the shoot. We kept on reshooting just because we wanted to give it our best shot. We shoot in our compound and on our street.”

Another top notch trailer by the bois is Season 4 of popular TV series ‘Money Heist’which they created in April.The video, which went viral on social media, gained the attention of Spanish actor, Álvaro Morte, the lead character who goes by the name, The Professor or Salvador “Salva” Martín in Money Heist.

Early this year, they also caught the attention of Will Smith after their perfect remake of ‘Bad Boys Forever” trailer, as well as the attention of Dwayne Johnson and Lebron James.

So far so good for the Ikorodu bois, who have not lost sight of their education. Sanni is a university student, Muiz is studying to become a doctor while Malik wants to go into acting.

With 600,000 followers on their instagram handle and another 100,000 plus on Twitter, which is where the Extraction trailer got noticed, the sky is beckoning for the Ikorodu bois and their future sure looks bright.

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