AlUla to host wave of new film and TV productions

• Up to six projects in coming weeks
• Result of increased financial incentives
• Target of 100 films by 2030

An ancient Saudi Arabian desert landscape is to host several new film and television productions in the coming weeks, according to the Royal Commission for AlUla.

The productions will be shot in the diverse scenery of AlUla, which the kingdom is developing into a global entertainment and tourism hub as it seeks to attract more international filmmakers.

“We have the next two productions in the pipeline, and we have five or six productions within the region also looking to film in AlUla starting in the next couple of weeks,” Phillip Jones, chief tourism officer at the Royal Commission for AlUla, told AGBI.

He declined to identify the productions, citing non-disclosure agreements.

The kingdom, which lifted a 35-year ban on cinemas in 2018, is using incentives and new studio infrastructure to attract Hollywood and Bollywood productions.

It is part of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s Vision 2030 plan to build a domestic film industry and diversify the economy away from oil.

The government raised its cash rebate for film and TV production costs from 40 percent to as much as 60 percent of eligible local spending, a move announced at the Cannes Film Festival in May. The increase came as the war between Israel, the US and Iran, which began in late February, disrupted air travel and tourism across the Gulf.

The new pipeline builds on a string of productions filmed in AlUla since 2020, when the Russo Brothers’ war drama Cherry, starring Tom Holland, was shot there. The region later hosted Gerard Butler’s action thriller Kandahar, billed as the first major feature filmed entirely in Saudi Arabia, and Norah, the first Saudi feature shot in AlUla.

More recently, Chasing Red, a young-adult romance starring Madelaine Petsch and Gavin Casalegno, began filming under a four-film partnership between Film AlUla and Los Angeles-based Stampede Ventures.

The agreement also includes the Emma Roberts thriller Fourth Wall and on-the-job production training for 50 Saudis.

AlUla, a desert region roughly the size of Belgium in Saudi Arabia’s northwest, has emerged as a focal point of the country’s efforts to build a film industry.

Its sandstone cliffs and canyons, 2,000-year-old Nabataean tombs, large freshwater oasis and old market town provide varied backdrops for different genres that officials hope can double for locations around the world on screen.

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It is also home to Hegra, Saudi Arabia’s first Unesco World Heritage site.

Jones said AlUla Studios’ operator, Manhattan Beach Studios, which runs roughly 600 soundstages worldwide and is home to James Cameron’s ‘Avatar’ sequels, had helped attract productions to the site’s two soundstages.

“That brings automatic credibility to what we’re doing from a film perspective in the destination,” he said.

Speaking at a Variety-hosted panel at the Cannes Film Festival last year, Manhattan Beach Studios’ group chief studio and real estate officer, Jason Hariton, said AlUla’s two 25,000-square-foot soundstages represented only an early phase of the site’s capacity, with significant room to expand.

Saudi Arabia has set a target of shooting 100 films by 2030, a goal announced by the Ministry of Investment in 2021.

The Saudi Film Commission said its incentives have attracted more than 64 local and international productions.

The movies and projects backed by the programmes have spent more than SAR1 billion ($267 million) in the country between 2020 and 2024 and generated an average of 1,230 jobs a year during the period, while more than 2,500 crew members worked on media projects in 2024.

Bafta-winning director Shekhar Kapur, the filmmaker behind Elizabeth and Bandit Queen, previously told AGBI he saw “a big future in Saudi for the creation of entertainment” that could change perspectives about Arab people and societies.

“Remember, we have a narrative that is so far being very Western driven,” he said.

“I think that the changing influence of cinema and content to shift the narrative in the world will come from this region.”