{"id":119215,"date":"2026-04-30T02:05:56","date_gmt":"2026-04-30T05:05:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ubirataonline.com.br\/saudi-arabias-first-hollywood-style-flop\/"},"modified":"2026-04-30T02:06:00","modified_gmt":"2026-04-30T05:06:00","slug":"saudi-arabias-first-hollywood-style-flop","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ubirataonline.com.br\/en\/saudi-arabias-first-hollywood-style-flop\/","title":{"rendered":"Saudi Arabia\u2019s First Hollywood-Style Flop"},"content":{"rendered":"

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As originally envisioned, the historical action epic Desert Warrior<\/em> would be a film of groundbreaking firsts. It would be the first Hollywood-style tentpole movie shot entirely on location in Saudi Arabia under its de facto supreme ruler Mohammed bin Salman\u2019s Vision 2030<\/a>, a.k.a. the culture-washing governmental push intended to liberate Saudi society from its \u201caddiction\u201d to oil through soft-power alternatives like tourism and entertainment. Directed by Rise of the Planet of the Apes<\/em><\/a> filmmaker Rupert Wyatt and starring Marvel Cinematic Universe stalwart Anthony Mackie<\/a> (The Falcon and the Winter Soldier<\/em><\/a>, <\/em>Captain America: Civil War<\/em><\/a>), Desert Warrior<\/em> would also be the inaugural movie project to shoot at Neom Media<\/a>, a state-of-the-art, multibazillion-dollar media complex and studio backlot attached to Neom City<\/a>, a metropolis bordering the Red Sea.<\/p>\n

But when cameras began to roll in September 2021, neither Neom nor the country\u2019s moviemaking infrastructure was quite ready for its Hollywood close-up. With construction not nearly complete on the studio\u2019s 130,000 square feet of promised production space, the Desert Warrior<\/em> team was forced to improvise. To house the cavernous throne room of Sir Ben Kingsley\u2019s power-hungry Emperor Kisra \u2014 a space giant enough to showcase bloody gladiator battles, extravagant scenes of prisoner torture, and rampaging elephants \u2014 the crew built a massive ad hoc soundstage in the parking lot of the Grand Millennium<\/a> Hotel in Tabuk that was cooled by giant fans against the pulverizing desert heat. \u201cIt was like an inflatable stadium; it was this amazing thing,\u201d recalls one person who was on set for the duration of production. \u201cThere were no studios. There were studios after<\/em> us because of the film.\u201d<\/p>\n

It would not be the last time production staff was forced to effectively build the plane during takeoff. An array of physical production challenges, missing infrastructure, well-intentioned na\u00efvet\u00e9, regional warfare, and \u201ccreative differences\u201d combined to forestall final cut and imperil the movie\u2019s sale to international distributors. Words such as flop<\/em><\/a> and forgotten<\/em><\/a> became affixed to Desert Warrior<\/em> in the movie industry well before its release. This weekend \u2014 four years and seven months since cameras first rolled on the project \u2014 Desert Warrior<\/em> squeaked onto 1,010 American screens with the barest minimum of marketing and failed to crack the top ten of new movies. It grossed a mere $472,000: an unmitigated disaster.<\/p>\n

Talk to more than a dozen people at varying levels of involvement with the movie\u2019s long and twisting journey to the screen, however, and a kind of dual narrative emerges. Desert Warrior<\/em> is the most ambitious project in Saudi Arabian moviemaking history: a Braveheart<\/em>-esque \u201cMiddle-Eastern western\u201d of Sergio Leone\u2013inspired visual grandeur whose major action set pieces overwhelmingly rely on practical, in-camera photography (as opposed to the CGI and AI cheats dominating modern Hollywood), a project originally intended as a \u201cstatement movie<\/a>\u201d for both the Saudi film industry and the entire Arab-speaking region. But according to internal accounting by MBC Group, the corporate parent of Desert Warrior<\/em>\u2019s studio backer, MBC Studios, and a company majority owned<\/a> by Saudi Arabia\u2019s sovereign-wealth fund, the budget swelled from $70 million to at least $150 million (or by the unconfirmed estimate of one insider, $170 million).<\/p>\n