Breaking down Desert Warrior’s flop

The Kingdom’s most expensive film ever made has continued to disappoint. Desert Warrior, the USD 150 mn Saudi epic backed by MBC Studios and starring Avengers star Anthony Mackie and Academy Award laureate Ben Kingsley, grossed just USD 87k from 6.1k admissions in Saudi Arabia over its opening weekend, ranking eighth at the local box office.

Across the wider Middle East, total ticket sales have struggled to clear USD 225k, while the US run brought in roughly USD 596k from some 1k screens. Recovering anything close to the production budget at the box office is off the table, and industry headlines are now placing Desert Warrior alongside the costliest flops in cinema history.

A troubled road to the screen: The film was already wounded long before it reached the box office. Principal photography wrapped in February 2022, but a lengthy and difficult post-production stretched the timeline by four years. Director Rupert Wyatt — of Planet of the Apes fame — briefly walked away from the project in October 2024 over creative differences before returning to finish editing, with Gary Ross brought in for uncredited rewrites along the way.

Distribution was another headache: Film distributor Vertical only acquired the rights in February 2026, and industry sources flagged that Desert Warrior struggled to identify a clear demographic, looking like a big-budget Hollywood film without a compelling narrative.

The war might have put an extra damper on it. The release landed in the middle of the mostdisruptive regional crisis in years, with audiences across the GCC preoccupied by the US-Iran conflict, the Hormuz fallout, and rolling security alerts.

The silver lining: Desert Warrior is the most expensive production ever shot in the Kingdom, with principal photography in Neom and Tabuk, and Saudi crews receiving on-the-job training as part of the broader push to build out a domestic film industry. The USD 150 mn spend built filmmaking infrastructure in Saudi Arabia that future productions can continue to draw on, meaning the strategic case might not collapse with the box office.

What to watch: Whether decision makers read Desert Warrior as a timing problem (war + a troubled five-year post-production) or a strategic one (Saudi tentpoles can’t crack global audiences). New projects are already in the pipeline, including Unbroken Sword from Game of Thrones director Alik Sakharov. The bigger question for the sector is whether the next big swing lands in a calmer geopolitical window to truly test the case for big Saudi productions.