How Saudi Arabia’s Hollywood dream vanished into the desert sand

When a country has too much money and too little time, the quickest solution is usually an open checkbook. Over the past decade, Saudi Arabia has followed that logic almost to the letter: buying football stars for billions, launching golf leagues that have rattled the sporting world, and trying to build futuristic cities in the middle of the desert. But cinema is another matter. It is an industry built on emotion, timing and creative instinct, and “Desert Warrior” has shown that even mountains of cash cannot guarantee success.

The film, meant to serve as the kingdom’s new cultural calling card, instead became one of the most expensive and resounding failures in modern cinema: a $150 million production that simply disappeared into the sand.

The story of “Desert Warrior” is not only a story about bad cinema. It is also a glimpse into what happens when a centralized regime tries to engineer culture from the top down. The historical action drama, set in the Arabian Peninsula in the seventh century, reached cinemas after a five-year ordeal. Starring Anthony Mackie, best known today as the new Captain America, and Oscar winner Ben Kingsley, it was billed by Britain’s Daily Telegraph as Saudi Arabia’s answer to “Lawrence of Arabia.” The aim was obvious: to show the world that Saudi Arabia was no longer merely an exporter of oil, but a global content power.

Vision 2030: Buying the Road to Progress

To understand the scale of the gamble, one has to look at the wider context. The film was produced by MBC Studios, the production arm of the Middle East’s largest broadcasting group, which is controlled by the Saudi government. It is part of Saudi Vision 2030, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s vast plan to wean the kingdom’s economy off its dependence on oil.

Under that vision, Saudi Arabia has already poured billions into LIV Golf, the breakaway tournament created as an aggressive rival to the American professional golf establishment. It also launched the Riyadh Comedy Festival in 2025, bringing in stars such as Dave Chappelle and Kevin Hart at great expense in an effort to soften the kingdom’s image on human rights and freedom of expression. “Desert Warrior” was supposed to be the cinematic jewel in the crown, a showcase for the futuristic city of Neom, where giant studios were built especially for the project.

A Production in the Eye of the Storm

But Hollywood, it turns out, does not much like having dictators, even self-styled enlightened ones, dictate its rhythm. “Desert Warrior” fell into what the industry calls production hell. British director Rupert Wyatt, of “Rise of the Planet of the Apes,” was removed from the project during the editing stage after clashes with MBC Studios. According to reports in Variety, the Saudis wanted a brisk, straightforward action film, while Wyatt was trying to make a complex two-and-a-half-hour historical epic. He was later brought back in an attempt to salvage what remained.

The film also tried to have it both ways: telling an ostensibly authentic Arab story through unmistakably Hollywood eyes. The plot centers on Princess Hind, played by Aiysha Hart, who refuses to become the concubine of the Persian emperor Khosrow, played by Kingsley, and leads a rebellion against him. A New York Times review noted that the film appeared to be attempting a form of indirect diplomacy on women’s rights in Saudi Arabia, but ultimately looked like another big-budget Hollywood movie that happened to have been shot in the kingdom.

The Geopolitics of Failure

The timing of the release could hardly have been worse. “Audiences have no appetite for a film about war in the desert while a real war is raging in the Middle East,” one industry observer told Deadline. The war in Gaza and the military tensions with Iran made the film’s premise, in which Arabs fight Persians, far too charged. By June 2025, when the US struck nuclear facilities in Iran, the film was already being seen as toxic by international distributors worried about unrest.

Iran, for its part, attacked the film as “historical revisionism” designed to serve Saudi interests against Tehran. In the end, no major studio was willing to touch it. Distribution went instead to Vertical Entertainment, a small independent company better known for films that go straight to streaming and VOD. The result was a humiliating opening of less than half a million dollars on more than 1,000 screens in the US, among the worst performances ever recorded for a release of that scale.

Public opinion: "A two-hour commercial"

On social media, critics were merciless. Film commentator Dan Murrell summed up what many thought of the Saudi experiment: the problem, he said, was that Saudi Arabia was trying to imitate Hollywood at its worst moment. The kingdom had built impressive studios, but had forgotten that audiences do not want to sit through a two-hour advertisement for the Saudi film industry. Murrell added that the film’s disastrous Rotten Tomatoes score, around 29 percent among critics, showed that it was simply boring, the worst sin an action film can commit.

Even at home, the film collapsed. In Saudi Arabia, it made just $87,000 in its opening weekend and ranked only eighth at the box office. Saudi audiences, it turned out, preferred authentic local hits or actual Marvel movies to an artificial attempt to create a “local Hollywood” by force.

Was the Lesson Learned?

The production team has tried to project optimism, arguing that the $150 million was not spent only on the film, but also on building infrastructure. For Mohammed bin Salman, however, the failure is a warning sign. Money can buy actors, studios and publicity. It cannot buy relevance, and it cannot buy the affection of an audience. 

For Israelis, the story is a reminder that a regional neighbor is in the middle of a deep, almost desperate transformation. Saudi Arabia is prepared to spend enormous sums to enter the family of Western nations, but the road is full of traps. “Desert Warrior” may be remembered as a strange chapter in Saudi history: the moment the kingdom discovered that while the desert may be rich in oil, growing a Hollywood there overnight is something else entirely.