Nigerians went in celebration mood after reports that Nollywood actress Funke Akindele was chosen as one of the cast in the Marvel Studios superhero flick Avengers: Infinity Wars.
The news was so widely celebrated that it caused some sort of frenzy and trended for over seventy-two hours on social media.
This was expected because her fans were delighted to see the Jenifa’s diary actress listed along with Hollywood bigwigs such as Robert Downey Jr, Chris Hemsworth, Benedict Cumberbatch, Zoe Saldana, Scarlet Johansson and several others.
But that excitement was cut off when Funke’s name suddenly disappeared from IMDB’s database and replaced with another Nigerian actress, Genevieve Nnaji and fans began to wonder, what was really going on?
IMDB, the Internet Movie Database, is an online database of information related to films, television programs and video games, including cast, production crew, fictional characters.
The site enables registered users to submit new material and edits to existing entries. Although most data is checked before going live, especially when being submitted by new users, the system has been open to errors, and some sections are even abused.
We then did some digging and it turned out that IMDB is easily accessible just like the popular search engine, Wikipedia, thus anyone can edit names, dates and other details.
NET findings also discovered that celebrities like Kim Kardashian’s have had their names ‘imported into Imdb’s website in the past.
The Question here is, who is trying to be mischievous with the listing? Or is it a deliberate attempt to attract Africa, especially Nigeria who’s film industry, Nollywood is one of the highest gross earners in the world? We don’t have the answers, but for the sake of clarity, we hope no one is messing with information as huge as important as this.
For further clarity, NET reached out to the actress to seek her reaction on this but neither did she nor her management take their calls nor responded to our messages as at the time of this report.