Saudi Arabia held a private screening on Wednesday, 18 April of the Hollywood blockbuster "Black Panther" to herald the launch of movie theaters in the kingdom, and tickets go on sale Thursday for public showings on Friday.
Authorities planned the invitation-only event in a concert hall converted into a cinema complex in the capital, Riyadh. The screening, attended by both men and women, will be followed by a rush to build movie theaters in major cities.
Audience members clearly enjoyed the moment, eating popcorn and erupting into applause and hoots when the movie started.
It's a stark reversal for a country where public movie screenings were banned in the 1980s during a wave of ultra-conservatism that swept Saudi Arabia. Many Saudi clerics view Western movies and even Arabic films made in Egypt and Lebanon as sinful.
The crown prince is behind measures such as lifting a ban on women driving that will go into effect this summer, and bringing back concerts and other forms of entertainment to satiate the desires of the country's majority young population. The social push by the 32-year-old heir to the throne is part of his so-called Vision 2030, a blueprint for the country that aims to boost local spending and create jobs amid sustained lower oil prices.
The Saudi government projects that the opening of movie theatres will contribute more than 90 billion riyals ($24 billion) to the economy and create more than 30,000 jobs by 2030. The kingdom says there will be 300 cinemas with around 2,000 screens built by 2030.
For the most part though, Saudis who wanted to watch a film in a movie theater would have to drive to nearby Bahrain or the United Arab Emirates for weekend trips to the cinema.
In the 1970s, there were informal movie screenings but the experience could be interrupted by the country's religious police, whose powers have since been curbed.
Saudi writer and dissident Jamal Khashoggi describes the theaters of the 1970s as being "like American drive-ins, except much more informal."
In an opinion piece for The Washington Post, he wrote that to avoid being arrested at one of these screenings in Medina, a friend of his broke his leg jumping off a wall to escape the religious police.
By the 1980s, movie screenings were largely banned unless they took place in private residential compounds for foreigners or at cultural centers run by foreign embassies.
Access to streaming services, such as Netflix, and satellite TV steadily eroded attempts by the government to censor what the Saudi public could view.
Movies screened in Saudi cinemas will be subject to approval by government censors, as is the case in other Arab countries. Scenes of violence are not cut, but scenes involving nudity, sex or even kissing often do get axed.
The US-based AMC was granted the first license to operate a cinema in Saudi Arabia in a deal signed earlier this month in California with the crown prince.
AMC is partnering with a subsidiary of Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund, known as the Public Investment Fund, to build up to 40 AMC cinemas across the country over the next five years.
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