Inside Saudi Arabia’s Billion Dollar Bet on Hollywood
Illustrated by Christopher Hughes
On a weekday night in Riyadh, close to 10 p.m., the lobby of a newly built multiplex hums with the low roar of a city that has discovered the movies. Teenagers cluster around concession stands, families drift toward escalators, and showtimes stretch deep into the early hours — 1 a.m., 2 a.m., even later — timed to a climate that keeps life indoors until after dark. Inside one auditorium, a late screening of 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple unspools before a mixed crowd. The graphic, R-rated horror film embraces themes of satanism and references to a notorious British pedophile. But a woman in a burka settles into her seat, apparently unperturbed, balancing popcorn and a drink discreetly beneath the fabric. She watches without hesitation as the gore plays out onscreen. The only overt censorship involves nudity — a particularly well-endowed zombie, naked in the original, is given a discreet pair of digitally added cycling shorts.
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Illustrated by Christopher Hughes
The scene feels jarring only to outsiders; for local audiences, it is simply another night at the movies. Eight years ago, there were no cinemas in Saudi Arabia. Today, there are multiplexes, comedy festivals, esports arenas and a Red Sea International Film Festival red carpet designed to rival Cannes.
Even the war in neighboring Iran, which has seen drone attacks directed at Saudi Arabia, has, so far, had little impact on Riyadh nightlife. Cinemas remain open and packed, evening moviegoing being a popular pastime during Ramadan for people after they break their fasts.
That rapid cultural shift helps explain why Saudi Arabia is now spending billions far beyond its borders. The Kingdom’s bet on entertainment at home has been matched by an equally ambitious push abroad — one that is rapidly reshaping Hollywood’s balance sheet.
(Saudi-based investment extends to the parent company of THR; SRMG, a publicly traded media firm in Saudi Arabia, is a minority investor in PMC, co-owner of THR.)
Eight thousand miles away, that same strategy may help finance one of the most consequential deals in entertainment history. Paramount Skydance’s proposed $110 billion takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery — a merger that would unite Paramount’s century-old IP library with HBO, CNN and Warners’ global television assets — is being powered by $24 billion from Gulf sovereign wealth funds, including Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF), and capital from the Qatar Investment Authority and Abu Dhabi’s L’imad Holding Co. The filing by Paramount Skydance with the Securities Exchange Commission did not outline how much the funds planned to contribute, but sources familiar with the investment said the total amount was around $24 billion, with Saudi Arabia’s PIF contributing about $12 billion, and sovereign wealth funds for Abu Dhabi and Qatar putting up around $6 billion each.
Paramount declined repeated requests by THR for comment.
The Saudis backing the Warner Bros. deal represents more than just another international investor taking a financial stake in Hollywood. For Riyadh, the deal offers the House of Saud proximity to American media power — and, potentially, to the political ecosystem that surrounds it.
On paper, the investors are passive. The filing notes that the sovereign wealth funds will have no governance rights in Paramount-Warner Bros. It’s a setup designed to help the Paramount-WBD merger secure regulatory approval without triggering an investigation by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States. Speaking to CNBC on March 3, on the sidelines of the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, FCC chairman Brendan Carr confirmed he expected the merger to be approved “pretty quickly.”
But in Hollywood — and in Washington — few believe that $24 billion won’t come with strings attached, particularly for a deal that will include CNN, HBO and a film catalog with rights to Batman, Superman and Harry Potter.
For many analysts, the investments are best understood as part of a broader effort to reshape how the Kingdom is perceived abroad.
“It’s very obvious, from my point of view, that this is not only about entertainment in the U.S., it’s also about CNN. It’s also about soft power,” says Stephan Roll, a political economist who heads the Africa and Middle East Division at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs in Berlin. “It’s about rebranding the image of Saudi Arabia in the West.”
Roll argues the Saudis are following the same game plan as Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, which ha