What Happened
Saeed Al Nahyan’s TwoFour54 in Abu Dhabi now hosts 12 AI video pipelines churning 60-minute features in 48 hours. Each costs $8 000 to $12 000 including Midjourney licenses and elevenlabs voice clones. Saudi NEOM’s Tabuk Films signed a $40 M deal with Runway to produce 200 Arabic titles by 2025. These films skip cinemas and land straight on Shahid and OSN where subscription ARPU is $6.50 versus Netflix’s $11.20.
Why It Matters
Gulf telcos need exclusive catalogs to justify 5G bundling. AI slop fills the gap cheaper than Bollywood imports. Quality is irrelevant because the audience is mobile first and tolerant of glitches. The real play is data: every minute streamed trains local LLMs that Mubadala and PIF will license to global majors.
Who Wins & Loses
MBC Group and Etisalat win. Hollywood studios lose leverage in licensing negotiations. Local actors and crew lose gigs to avatars.
What to Watch
Watch for Saudi sovereign wealth funds to acquire AI tool startups at 20x revenue. Expect a regional LLM fine tuned on 10 000 hours of Gulf dialect by Q1 2025.
Social PulseRedditHackerNews
Dubai engineers brag on LinkedIn about shipping three features a week. Riyadh founders whisper about government grants that cover 80 % of cloud costs. The chatter is less about art and more about unit economics.
Sources
- AI slop movies are the new direct-to-video cash grabs