Photo: Courtesy of Vertical
As originally envisioned, the historical action epic Desert Warrior 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’s Vision 2030, a.k.a. the culture-washing governmental push intended to liberate Saudi society from its “addiction” to oil through soft-power alternatives like tourism and entertainment. Directed by Rise of the Planet of the Apes filmmaker Rupert Wyatt and starring Marvel Cinematic Universe stalwart Anthony Mackie (The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Captain America: Civil War), Desert Warrior would also be the inaugural movie project to shoot at Neom Media, a state-of-the-art, multibazillion-dollar media complex and studio backlot attached to Neom City, a metropolis bordering the Red Sea.
But when cameras began to roll in September 2021, neither Neom nor the country’s moviemaking infrastructure was quite ready for its Hollywood close-up. With construction not nearly complete on the studio’s 130,000 square feet of promised production space, the Desert Warrior team was forced to improvise. To house the cavernous throne room of Sir Ben Kingsley’s power-hungry Emperor Kisra — a space giant enough to showcase bloody gladiator battles, extravagant scenes of prisoner torture, and rampaging elephants — the crew built a massive ad hoc soundstage in the parking lot of the Grand Millennium Hotel in Tabuk that was cooled by giant fans against the pulverizing desert heat. “It was like an inflatable stadium; it was this amazing thing,” recalls one person who was on set for the duration of production. “There were no studios. There were studios after us because of the film.”
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 naïveté, regional warfare, and “creative differences” combined to forestall final cut and imperil the movie’s sale to international distributors. Words such as flop and forgotten became affixed to Desert Warrior in the movie industry well before its release. This weekend — four years and seven months since cameras first rolled on the project — Desert Warrior 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.
Talk to more than a dozen people at varying levels of involvement with the movie’s long and twisting journey to the screen, however, and a kind of dual narrative emerges. Desert Warrior is the most ambitious project in Saudi Arabian moviemaking history: a Braveheart-esque “Middle-Eastern western” of Sergio Leone–inspired 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 “statement movie” 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’s studio backer, MBC Studios, and a company majority owned by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign-wealth fund, the budget swelled from $70 million to at least $150 million (or by the unconfirmed estimate of one insider, $170 million).
On the positive side: Neither 120-degree heat nor raging sandstorms nor the absence of roads in and out of set could stop principal photography. And while almost everything had to be trucked in — including 12,500 extras from as far away as former Soviet Georgia, a technical crew from some 40 countries, and camera equipment from across the Middle East — even the COVID-era protocols that slowed production to a standstill at times could not prevent the movie from coming in on schedule. With hindsight perhaps softening memories of sunstroke, cast members and a number of below-the-line crew now fairly rhapsodize about the uniqueness of the shoot. “To be honest, it’s quite the miracle that we pulled this off,” says Desert Warrior production designer Paki Smith.
Sharlto Copley plays Desert Warrior’s main villain, a bloodthirsty warlord hell-bent on capturing an Arabian princess named Hind (British Saudi actress Aiysha Hart), whom a Persian emperor (Kingsley) has claimed as his concubine. In an email to Vulture, Copley took pains to dispel an idea that has particularly flourished in the Hollywood trade press of the movie as a “troubled” production. “I’ve worked on films all over the world under every kind of pressure. What we did on Desert Warrior was difficult, no question,” he says. “But to reduce that experience to ‘chaos’ or ‘dysfunction’ isn’t just an oversimplification, it’s a distortion.”
On the flipside, since wrapping principal photography in December 2021, Desert Warrior has languished in postproduction hell. Depending on whose viewpoint you choose to believe — and there are competing ones — early cuts of the movie were either well received by MBC or such a complete disaster that the studio felt compelled to order an overhaul. (One quick fix that was proposed but never pursued: paying Morgan Freeman $2 million to provide voice-over.) “Nobody at the company had the experience to make this kind of movie,” says an insider with knowledge of the production process. “There was none of the market research one does for a film originally budgeted at $70 million. Who is its targeted demo? Arabs don’t want to watch it because they don’t think it’s authentic. And nobody in the West gives a shit about Princess Hind.”
Not long after production, turmoil roiled MBC Group, with a 50-plus-page internal 2022 audit revealing a culture of wild overspending, unclear strategy, corporate disorganization, and lack of internal controls. That disarray ultimately stalled MBC Studios’ aspiration to become a forward face of Saudi Arabia’s burgeoning film and TV ambitions. Meanwhile, the studio fired Wyatt’s editor, Richard Mettler; the director was stripped of the power to oversee edits; and an executive shuffle at MBC Studios resulted in Wyatt departing the project. By some accounts, he was “fired,” by others, he went on “hiatus” or simply “refused to make changes. He wouldn’t show up to meetings.” (Wyatt declined to comment for this article.) Further test screenings of the non-Wyatt edits also proved disastrous. And for years after Hamas’ October 7 attack on Israel, no theatrical distributors or streamers would touch Desert Warrior with a ten-foot throwing spear.
Photo: Courtesy of Vertical
What all sides can agree upon, though, is that after the dismissal of the MBC studio-executive regime demanding changes, Wyatt returned to complete production and reedit the film. In February 2026, Desert Warrior was finally sold to the small-potatoes American distributor Vertical (behind releases such as the recent Riz Ahmed iteration of Hamlet, Sundance award winner Atropia, and Liam Neeson’s Ice Road: Vengeance).
In a final you-can’t-make-this-shit-up development, Desert Warrior — in which Arab heroes rise up against villains from the Persian empire — reached North American movie theaters at a time when audiences want to see anything but more desert warfare. (With the U.S. at war with Iran after two and a half years of the Israel-Hamas war, many have had their fill.) “Man makes his plans and the gods laugh,” says Ali Jaafar, MBC’s head of film and global series. “Destiny has decreed that this film comes out in the geopolitical circumstances that it does. It’s a delicious twist of irony.”
According to Jaafar, the plan for Desert Warrior was simple in concept if not in execution: “Take a story from our region and translate it with world-class filmmakers for audiences around the world, all while retaining a kind of local flavor and local sense of folklore.” MBC enlisted Jeremy Bolt, the British producer behind the successful Resident Evil film franchise, to oversee physical production. And it hired David Self (writer of 2002’s Oscar-winning Road to Perdition and the historical bio-drama Thirteen Days) to plot a screenplay set in seventh-century pre-Islamic Arabia.
In 2019, Bolt brought on British writer-director Wyatt, whose Planet of the Apes installment successfully resuscitated the franchise from Hollywood’s IP graveyard, grossing $481.8 million worldwide. His original pitch for Desert Warrior: “Lawrence of Arabia meets Mad Max.” After an uncredited rewrite by Gary Ross (The Hunger Games), Wyatt further retooled the Desert Warrior script with his screenwriter wife, Erica Beeney (with whom the director had co-written the 2019 sci-fi thriller Captive State), shifting the focus to the female protagonist. In its final form, Desert Warrior follows Princess Hind as she repeatedly evades capture and matures into a capable resistance leader — turns out she is the desert warrior of the title — all while reluctantly placing her trust in the swashbuckling yet noble Bandit (Mackie) as she unites fractious Arab tribesmen to battle the occupying Persian-Sasanian army.
To hear it from a source with knowledge of Desert Warrior’s development and production process, higher-ups at the studio’s parent company, MBC Group, were fixated on casting “an American or British movie star” as the male lead. For some members of the Saudi royal court — the country’s secretive, most powerful administrative body, which has green light and veto power over all cultural policies and vets major entertainment investments like Desert Warrior — Mackie was a confusing choice. “They were like, ‘Why the fuck are we having [a Black man] as the lead of our first Saudi Arabian movie?’” this person recalls. (Jaafar calls that characterization “entirely inaccurate”: “I’ve never heard that quote before. And it certainly doesn’t square with our experience of the reaction of Anthony being in the movie.”)
As filming commenced, unforeseen complexities piled up to the sky. In the absence of a skilled local labor force, below-the-line crew had to be brought in from across the region — Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria — as well as from Canada, Italy, Serbia, South Africa, and the U.K., some 600 non-cast crew in all. Despite layering and wearing protective head coverings, the director repeatedly suffered sunstroke. A vast phalanx of “sweepers” was hired to erase performers’ footprints between every take of scenes shot in the sand dunes. When Saudi Arabia decided to close the border for six weeks due to COVID safety protocols, crucial equipment got stuck outside the country. Sets would be built and then junked only to be rebuilt again at considerable cost due to an overall lack of familiarity with standard Hollywood filmmaking procedures.
Most challengingly, thousands of extras portraying the Persian-Sasanian army were brought in from Georgia. Wyatt cast background performers by region — Francophone Arabs, Alawites from Syria — for the movie’s hodgepodge representation of Arabian tribes. But he insisted Caucasians play the bad guys both for historical accuracy and audience clarity, so that in the climactic battle sequence, you could easily identify who was fighting whom. “Every day was like learning to make a film again,” says Bolt, who has made nearly four dozen movies over a 38-year career. “We would have to work closely with our teams to remind them they could not assume anything at all. You just had to every day realize you don’t know anything.”
Although MBC’s internal audit states Desert Warrior’s original budget was $70 million, a source close to the director disputes that figure, saying it was “never going to cost less than $100 million.” Still, unexpected costs spiraled. “We had a shutdown because of COVID, and Saudi Arabia decided to close the border; that cost us $20 million,” Bolt says. “We had to push the movie six months. So then when you’re confronted with a place where there’s no infrastructure; [executive producer] Eric Hedayat and I estimate that probably cost another $20 million. Very quickly, you’re at $140 million. That’s what these movies cost, minimum.”
Wyatt wasted no time assembling a director’s cut (missing only one key dramatic scene set in a leper colony, which was scrapped during principal photography due to a sandstorm). That cut was shown to MBC top brass in Dubai in the summer of 2022 to what one source close to the production calls “a very positive reaction,” and additional pick-up shoots were green-lighted for February 2023. But this is when things got contentious. The MBC Studios managing director overseeing the project was dismissed and replaced by a former Amazon Studios exec, who diagnosed a number of systemic problems with Desert Warrior. There began a roundelay of creative quarrels between director and studio over tone, clarity, characters’ “emotional connections,” and runtime. The idea to hire Freeman to provide voice-over was proposed and met with immediate pushback by Wyatt, according to multiple sources.
After MBC fired Wyatt’s editor, it installed editor Kelley Dixon (Breaking Bad, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever) to recut the movie without Wyatt’s input, causing the director to go “ballistic,” according to a person close to the film. That version of Desert Warrior was test-screened in Las Vegas to dismal results. Unable to exercise creative control, Wyatt considered lobbying the Directors Guild of America to have his name removed from the film. But he was persuaded by Bolt that “going to war” would create ruinous controversy for something the director was ultimately very proud of, a source close to the production said. Bolt and MBC’s Jaafar refused to discuss the circumstances surrounding Wyatt’s departure from Desert Warrior. In Variety, Wyatt delivered his only public remarks on the matter: “There was a desire to start to change the movie. And it wasn’t really the movie that I had set out to make, nor had I shot. So I resisted, and I was sidelined. I was sidelined for a good period.”
Photo: Courtesy of Vertical/B) MBC Studios
In February 2024, sales representatives from AGC International held buyer screenings of Desert Warrior for Netflix, Amazon, and every major studio; not one made an offer to acquire distribution rights. “Every single person said the same thing,” says an insider familiar with that process. “‘Wow, beautifully shot. There’s masterful action scenes.’ They said, ‘There’s no audience for this movie after the Israel-Hamas war.’”
When MBC’s managing director stepped down that spring, however, studio executives asked Wyatt to return to finish the film. With the studio agreeing to his demand for full restoration of creative control, he resumed postproduction in September 2024 and delivered another director’s cut in March 2025. In September of that year, Desert Warrior finally premiered at the Zurich Film Festival, where it received mixed to positive reviews. Echoing the common refrain, Screen Daily praised the movie as “visually stunning” while bashing it as “a cumbersome piece of storytelling that may struggle to connect with international audiences.”
In February, Vertical Entertainment paid an undisclosed sum for Desert Warrior’s U.S. and U.K. distribution rights. The company is known for negotiating small upfront fees in the low-seven-figure range for mid-tier indie movies, subsequently bundling and licensing the content to sell to streamers for larger paydays. “The film now being released to audiences is very much the filmmaker’s vision, which we back 100 percent,” says MBC’s Jaafar. “We started this film as a team, and we ended it as a team.”
Desert Warrior has almost zero chance of theatrically recouping its production budget. But for a deep-pocketed company like MBC — which went public in 2024 with a starting valuation of $2.2 billion — an $80 million budget overrun can be waved away as little more than a rounding error on the yearly balance sheet.
Consequently, another insider with a privileged view of the entire production and postproduction process feels that assigning blame for the movie’s lengthy journey to the screen is beside the point. “This whole exercise is a cautionary tale of when a big company with lots of money and good intentions takes on something they’re not really qualified to do,” he says. “There was lots of know-how at MBC, but they made a lot of mistakes along the way. Well-intentioned mistakes. They ended up with this big disconnect between what they thought they were paying for — an epic, heroic journey like The Last of the Mohicans or The Last Samurai — and what they got: this bold, atmospheric, culturally authentic Sergio Leone–type film. The thing a talented but strong-willed Hollywood filmmaker thought he was making.”
