A
Alena Belova
Guest
In July, Abu Dhabi's film commission put out a press release about Dune: Part Three. The shoot had lasted 31 days in the emirate, two of them in Al Ain. It was the third of Denis Villeneuve's Dune films to shoot in the emirate, whose desert had a long life of its own before Hollywood found it. The release is generous with numbers. 206 local crew, including 12 stunt performers. 336 local contractors and drivers. 38 residents in the crowd scenes, six interns, more than 600 people based in the UAE in all. Somewhere in the middle it mentions that the production "benefited from Abu Dhabi's cashback rebate program."
How much it benefited, the release doesn't say. I went looking for that number, and for the same number anywhere else in the region, and spent the better part of a week finding out that it almost never exists in public.
I got there sideways. I'd been reading about the region's cultural institutions, museums and arts funds mostly, and film commissions kept turning up as the strangest of them: cultural bodies that spend real money competing with each other. I wanted a simple table: for each country, what it offers foreign productions, and what that has cost it. The first half took an afternoon. The second half is the reason this piece exists.
The way these schemes work is easy to state. A foreign production spends money in your country, on local crew, hotels, catering, trucks, equipment, construction, and after the shoot, once an auditor has signed off on the receipts, you refund a percentage of it in cash. For a studio choosing where to shoot, the rebate behaves like a discount on the location. Abu Dhabi's dunes and Jordan's sandstone valleys and Morocco's ksour all photograph beautifully; what differs is the invoice, and the rebate is the largest line on it that a government can move.
So governments have been moving it, mostly upward, often announcing the new rates at major film festivals.
Saudi Arabia launched its rebate at the Red Sea festival in December 2021, at up to 40% of qualifying costs. At Cannes in May 2026 it raised the ceiling to up to 60% of eligible spending. Abu Dhabi, which has had a 30% rebate since 2013, moved to a 35% base from 1 January 2025, with uplifts for productions that score points on local content and crew, up to a total of 50%. Qatar announced its own scheme in November 2025: 40%, plus up to 10% on top, with applications opening this year. Jordan, which had a 25% ceiling, approved a sliding scale of 25% to 45% in May 2025, capped at 3.675 million dinars, about $5.25 million, per project. Turkey has offered up to 30% since 2019. Morocco started at 20% in 2017–18 and now offers 30%.
I could find no publicly documented cash rebate in Egypt comparable to the schemes above; its new rules for foreign shoots set up a single window for permits, with "incentives for major film projects" mentioned and not specified. Nor in Tunisia, where George Lucas built Tatooine in the 1970s. "Pas de cash rebate. Pas de guichet unique pour les productions étrangères," as a Tunisian business paper put it this spring: no rebate, no one-stop shop for foreign productions.
Put those dates in order and you get something that looks a lot like an auction, held over five years, for a fairly small pool of bidders: the few dozen big productions a year that need a desert, a medieval city or a souk, have the money to go wherever the deal is best, and have line producers whose job is to know every rate in this paragraph by heart. It isn't a clean auction, of course. Each scheme defines eligible costs differently, sets its own caps and minimum spends, and a percentage is worth nothing without crews, studios and a desert that looks right on camera. But the headline rate is the one number every country chooses to lead with.
The headline rate is the part that gets announced. The part that decides whether a producer believes it is usually two lines further down.
Morocco's official guide for foreign producers explains that within thirty days of an application the film centre will notify you of its agreement in principle, "sous réserve de la disponibilité des fonds," subject to the availability of funds. Jordan's rebate standards, issued this March, say that subsidies "will be allocated on a First Come First Serve basis, subject to the availability of the annual Cash Rebate Budget." Neither document says how large that budget is. When Saudi Arabia raised its rate to 60%, the announcement added that the commission was working with the Cultural Development Fund "to launch an enhanced model for managing and disbursing incentives." The announcement gave no production-level figures. The commission publicises the programme and how to apply, but I couldn't find an annual breakdown of which productions received how much.
None of this is unusual. Every rebate in the world sits on top of a budget line, and the budget line is what makes the percentage real. A 60% rebate that a production can't count on is worth less than a 30% one that pays in four months. Which is why the question I started with, how much has actually gone out and to whom, is not a question about accountability so much as a question about the product itself.
Morocco's film centre, the Centre Cinématographique Marocain, publishes an annual report called the bilan cinématographique. It's a long French PDF of the kind most people never open: tables of national productions, festival grants, cinema attendance, censorship visas. Around page 25, in every edition I read from 2019 to 2025, there's a section headed "productions étrangères." It lists the foreign productions recorded in that year's spending table, one row each, with their category, the nationality of the producing company, the Moroccan company that serviced them, and the amount each invested in the country, to the dirham and often to the centime.
Since 2022 there's a second table: which productions got the cash rebate, and how much.
As far as I can tell, no other film body in the Middle East or North Africa publishes anything like it. So I read seven years of it, put every row into a spreadsheet, and added the rows back up against the report's own totals. Five years match to the dirham. 2024 matches, apart from one figure the report's summary table prints differently from its own list. 2025 is out by exactly 100,000 dirhams in one small category, and nothing in the report explains why.
Here's what the ledger shows.
Foreign productions spent 1.21 billion dirhams in Morocco in 2025, and 1.24 billion in 2024. In 2015 the figure was 366 million; in 2019, the last year before the pandemic, 796 million. In 2020 it fell to 211 million. By 2022 it was 934 million, and it has stayed above a billion since. The recovery didn't stop at the old level. It went on past it by half again.
The 2024 figure comes with a footnote I liked a lot. Part of that year's investment, the report says, "n'a pas été incluse dans le total présenté": it was left out of the total, because some operations weren't finished by the production companies in 2024 and were carried over into 2025. It's the sort of sentence you only find in an accounting document written by people who expect someone to check.
The biggest single line in seven years is Gladiator II, which spent 306 million dirhams in Morocco in 2023. Ridley Scott was back in the country where he'd shot much of the first film, the country where Aït Benhaddou has played Rome, Jerusalem and Yunkai. Second is the eighth season of Homeland, 267 million in 2019. Third is a title that doesn't exist yet: "Charlie's Tale," a feature listed in 2025 as British, serviced by Zak Productions, 252 million dirhams. In the rebate table a few pages later the same row reads "Charlie's Tale (The Odyssey)". It's Christopher Nolan's film, under its working title, and it accounts for a fifth of everything foreign productions spent in Morocco that year.
Working titles are all over the ledger, because productions shoot under code names to keep crowds and paparazzi away, and the film centre records whatever name the paperwork had. "Unt Merc Series (Episodes: 1 & 2)," American, 234 million dirhams in 2025. "The New Eve," German, 140 million in 2024; a year later the rebate table calls it "Zero A.D." Reading the ledger is partly a game of matching code names to releases, and you lose it more often than you'd like.
Once you stop looking at the famous rows and look at the totals, three things stand out.
The first is that most of the money isn't film. In 2025, television series accounted for 58% of foreign spending in Morocco, and feature films for 35%. In 2019 the series share was higher still: 504 million dirhams of 796 million. The image of Morocco as the backlot of the desert epic is a cinema-era image.
The second is that most of it isn't American. Productions the report lists as British spent around 470 million dirhams in Morocco in 2025, against 376 million for productions listed as American and 162 million for German ones. These are the nationalities of the producing companies, not of the audiences, but they're a fair map of who books the country.
The third is that a remarkable share of it goes through one door. Of the ten biggest foreign productions in Morocco since 2019, six were serviced by the same company, Kasbah Films in Tangier: two seasons' worth of Atomic, The Terminal List, the second season of The Wheel of Time, Convoy, The New Eve. For a sense of what "a foreign shoot" means on the ground, the film centre also counts shooting authorisations: 586 for foreign productions in 2025, against 110 rows in the spending list. Most authorisations are for news crews, TV programmes and small shoots. The money is concentrated in a few dozen productions, and those productions are concentrated in a few service companies.
One caveat before the numbers, because it matters. The tables don't show bank transfers. The 2022 report lists support "accordé", granted, "au titre de l'année 2022", for that year: eight foreign productions, 41.9 million dirhams. From 2023 the heading changes to "Productions ayant reçu le Cash Rebate", productions that received the rebate that year, with the amount of support granted to each. On that basis, ten productions received 109.1 million dirhams in 2023, twelve received 145.7 million in 2024, and twenty-four received 243.8 million in 2025, on budgets of 994.5 million dirhams spent in the country. The scheme more than doubled in two years, as the rate rose from 20% to 30% and more productions applied. A separate table lists the productions with an agreement in principle, money promised but not yet received: 309 million dirhams requested by twenty more productions in 2025.
Measured against those full in-country budgets, the rebates came to about 18% in 2023, 23% in 2024 and 24.5% in 2025. That doesn't mean Morocco is paying less than it advertises. The 30% applies to eligible spending, which excludes part of what a production lays out, so the gap between the two is built into the rules. But it gives you the number that the headline rate never does: for every dirham of rebate Morocco reports for 2025, about four dirhams were spent in the country by the productions that received it.
Whether that's a good deal, the ledger can't settle on its own. It doesn't tell you how much of that spending would have happened without the rebate, or how much of it stayed in Morocco once the hotels and caterers and equipment houses had paid their own bills. Abu Dhabi says, citing independently verified research, that "for every dirham paid through the scheme, more than three dirhams flows back into the economy." Morocco's figure measures something narrower, and the two aren't the same calculation. The difference is that you can check Morocco's.
It's worth setting those numbers next to the rest of Morocco's film economy, which is in the same report. In 2025, Moroccans bought 2.19 million cinema tickets, across 87 active screens in the whole country, for 129.8 million dirhams. Foreign productions spent more than nine times that in Morocco in the same year. The two aren't parts of one market, since foreign spending includes TV series, commercials and corporate films as well as features, but the gap gives you the scale. And the main fund that advances money to Moroccan productions, the avance sur recettes, has awarded 73.5 million dirhams a year in each of the last four years. In 2025 the rebates foreign productions received came to a little over three times that.
That isn't necessarily a scandal. The two are different instruments with different jobs: one buys foreign spending, the other builds a national cinema.
Here is what the rest of the region publishes, as far as I could find, with every figure traced to the body that released it or to a report that quotes it.
Saudi Arabia publishes its box office in detail, which makes sense for a commercial cinema market that reopened in 2018 after a long gap: that year's receipts were 38.6 million riyals. In 2025 they were 920.8 million riyals, from 18.8 million tickets across 62 cinemas and 603 screens, broken down region by region. Riyadh alone took 434.4 million, close to half the country. Saudi films took 122.6 million riyals from eleven releases. On the rebate side, the public figures are cumulative and soft: more than a billion riyals of production spending across incentivised projects between 2020 and 2024, domestic and foreign together, about 1,230 jobs a year. Box office tells you how the cinema market is doing, not how the rebate is managed, and on the rebate I found no annual payment figures and no list of productions. I should add that I read the Saudi figures through news reports quoting the Saudi Film Commission's annual reports; the commission's own sites wouldn't load from where I was working.
The UAE's box office is reported nationally: more than 734 million dirhams in 2025, from more than 14.8 million tickets. Abu Dhabi, the emirate actually paying rebates, publishes something else. It counts productions supported since 2013: 140 by June 2023, 180 by May 2025. It counts people with real care. Dune: Part Two: 27 shooting days, 300 local crew, 250 international crew, 500 extras. F1: 29 days across three shoots, 284 local crew. Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One: 15 days, 125 local freelance crew, 250 extras. The three-dirhams-for-one line came with the announcement of the 35% rate, attributed to "independently verified research", but I couldn't find the study itself published. In the public material I could find, Abu Dhabi gave no dirham figure for the amount spent or refunded on any single production.
Jordan has hosted, by its film commission's count, 115 foreign films and 29 international series, many of them in Wadi Rum, the valley that keeps playing Mars. In September 2023 its film commission put spending on Jordan's film industry at $519 million. In May 2025, nearly two years later, it put spending by the creative industries sector at the same $519 million. The statements I found don't say whether the estimate was revised or carried forward.
Turkey publishes more than most, through its culture ministry's annual activity reports. It has offered up to 30% to foreign productions since 2019. The ministry's own counts of foreign feature films given permission to shoot are 17 in 2019, 17 again in 2021 and 2022, and 12 in 2024; for 2025 the ministry reports ten foreign productions. Meanwhile Turkish cinema attendance, according to the national statistics office, fell from 68.5 million in 2017 to 27.7 million in 2025.
Qatar's scheme is too new for a comparable public record of payments to have emerged. For Egypt I couldn't find publicly accessible official figures on box office or on foreign shoots. Tunisia's statistics office publishes cinema attendance up to 2022, and Oman's published cinema statistics for 2020 and 2021. For Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Syria and Yemen I couldn't find comparable public figures at all, which says as much about what's online and searchable as about what exists in ministry files.
So the map, reduced to one question, looks like this. Who tells you what the rebate has gone to, year by year, production by production? Morocco. Who tells you something cumulative, or counts people instead of money? Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, Jordan. Who has no publicly documented rebate comparable to these schemes? Egypt and Tunisia, as far as I could find, and that says nothing about the strength of their film cultures. Who has a rebate and almost no public results? Turkey, partly, and Qatar, so far.
It's easy to read all of this as a story about transparency for its own sake, and there's something to that: rebates are public money, and public money is supposed to leave a trail. But I think the more useful way to read it is commercial.
When a line producer compares 60% in one country with 30% in another, they aren't comparing two numbers. They're comparing two promises, and the thing that makes a promise credible is evidence that it's been kept, at scale, to productions like theirs, recently. Morocco's report, typos and working titles and missing 100,000 dirhams included, is that evidence. It says: twenty-four foreign productions received the rebate last year, here are their names, here are the amounts, here's the company that serviced them. Anyone thinking of shooting there can read it. Anyone thinking of shooting somewhere else, as far as I could find, has no public equivalent to read.
Economists have names for this. In the previous piece in this series, about why a two-hour Alpine transfer can cost more than a flight, the problem was the one George Akerlof described as the market for "lemons": the buyer can't see quality in advance, so trust ends up priced in. Film incentives have the same asymmetry, except that the seller is a government and the thing the buyer can't see is whether it will pay. Michael Spence's answer, in his work on signalling, was that a signal only persuades if it's expensive to fake. A 60% headline costs a press release. A table of every payment, by production, year after year, is something a commission that didn't pay couldn't publish without being caught.
This is the same thing I keep running into in cultural data generally. The institutions that publish structured, checkable records about themselves end up being the ones that get understood, compared and chosen, by people and increasingly by machines. The ones that publish announcements end up being taken on faith, or not at all. A film commission is a cultural institution like any other in that respect. Its rate is its headline. Its ledger is its reputation.
Dune: Part Three comes out in December. Thanks to Abu Dhabi, we know how many people drove its trucks, how many residents stood in its crowds, how many interns it took on. How much of the emirate's money went into it, I couldn't find anywhere public.
How I did this: Morocco's figures come from the Centre Cinématographique Marocain's annual reports for 2019–2025. I re-added the spending and rebate tables against the reports' own totals; the shares, ratios and rankings are my calculations from them. Rebate rules come from official film-commission documents and government releases. Saudi box-office figures are from the Saudi Film Commission's annual reports as quoted by Argaam and Riyadh Daily, because the commission's own site could not be reached. Turkish attendance figures are TÜİK's, as reported in the Turkish press. Every reported figure links to its source; calculated shares, ratios and comparisons are identified as mine in the text.
How much it benefited, the release doesn't say. I went looking for that number, and for the same number anywhere else in the region, and spent the better part of a week finding out that it almost never exists in public.
I got there sideways. I'd been reading about the region's cultural institutions, museums and arts funds mostly, and film commissions kept turning up as the strangest of them: cultural bodies that spend real money competing with each other. I wanted a simple table: for each country, what it offers foreign productions, and what that has cost it. The first half took an afternoon. The second half is the reason this piece exists.
A discount on the desert
The way these schemes work is easy to state. A foreign production spends money in your country, on local crew, hotels, catering, trucks, equipment, construction, and after the shoot, once an auditor has signed off on the receipts, you refund a percentage of it in cash. For a studio choosing where to shoot, the rebate behaves like a discount on the location. Abu Dhabi's dunes and Jordan's sandstone valleys and Morocco's ksour all photograph beautifully; what differs is the invoice, and the rebate is the largest line on it that a government can move.
So governments have been moving it, mostly upward, often announcing the new rates at major film festivals.
Saudi Arabia launched its rebate at the Red Sea festival in December 2021, at up to 40% of qualifying costs. At Cannes in May 2026 it raised the ceiling to up to 60% of eligible spending. Abu Dhabi, which has had a 30% rebate since 2013, moved to a 35% base from 1 January 2025, with uplifts for productions that score points on local content and crew, up to a total of 50%. Qatar announced its own scheme in November 2025: 40%, plus up to 10% on top, with applications opening this year. Jordan, which had a 25% ceiling, approved a sliding scale of 25% to 45% in May 2025, capped at 3.675 million dinars, about $5.25 million, per project. Turkey has offered up to 30% since 2019. Morocco started at 20% in 2017–18 and now offers 30%.
I could find no publicly documented cash rebate in Egypt comparable to the schemes above; its new rules for foreign shoots set up a single window for permits, with "incentives for major film projects" mentioned and not specified. Nor in Tunisia, where George Lucas built Tatooine in the 1970s. "Pas de cash rebate. Pas de guichet unique pour les productions étrangères," as a Tunisian business paper put it this spring: no rebate, no one-stop shop for foreign productions.
Put those dates in order and you get something that looks a lot like an auction, held over five years, for a fairly small pool of bidders: the few dozen big productions a year that need a desert, a medieval city or a souk, have the money to go wherever the deal is best, and have line producers whose job is to know every rate in this paragraph by heart. It isn't a clean auction, of course. Each scheme defines eligible costs differently, sets its own caps and minimum spends, and a percentage is worth nothing without crews, studios and a desert that looks right on camera. But the headline rate is the one number every country chooses to lead with.
The fine print
The headline rate is the part that gets announced. The part that decides whether a producer believes it is usually two lines further down.
Morocco's official guide for foreign producers explains that within thirty days of an application the film centre will notify you of its agreement in principle, "sous réserve de la disponibilité des fonds," subject to the availability of funds. Jordan's rebate standards, issued this March, say that subsidies "will be allocated on a First Come First Serve basis, subject to the availability of the annual Cash Rebate Budget." Neither document says how large that budget is. When Saudi Arabia raised its rate to 60%, the announcement added that the commission was working with the Cultural Development Fund "to launch an enhanced model for managing and disbursing incentives." The announcement gave no production-level figures. The commission publicises the programme and how to apply, but I couldn't find an annual breakdown of which productions received how much.
None of this is unusual. Every rebate in the world sits on top of a budget line, and the budget line is what makes the percentage real. A 60% rebate that a production can't count on is worth less than a 30% one that pays in four months. Which is why the question I started with, how much has actually gone out and to whom, is not a question about accountability so much as a question about the product itself.
The one country that publishes the receipts
Morocco's film centre, the Centre Cinématographique Marocain, publishes an annual report called the bilan cinématographique. It's a long French PDF of the kind most people never open: tables of national productions, festival grants, cinema attendance, censorship visas. Around page 25, in every edition I read from 2019 to 2025, there's a section headed "productions étrangères." It lists the foreign productions recorded in that year's spending table, one row each, with their category, the nationality of the producing company, the Moroccan company that serviced them, and the amount each invested in the country, to the dirham and often to the centime.
Since 2022 there's a second table: which productions got the cash rebate, and how much.
As far as I can tell, no other film body in the Middle East or North Africa publishes anything like it. So I read seven years of it, put every row into a spreadsheet, and added the rows back up against the report's own totals. Five years match to the dirham. 2024 matches, apart from one figure the report's summary table prints differently from its own list. 2025 is out by exactly 100,000 dirhams in one small category, and nothing in the report explains why.
Here's what the ledger shows.
Foreign productions spent 1.21 billion dirhams in Morocco in 2025, and 1.24 billion in 2024. In 2015 the figure was 366 million; in 2019, the last year before the pandemic, 796 million. In 2020 it fell to 211 million. By 2022 it was 934 million, and it has stayed above a billion since. The recovery didn't stop at the old level. It went on past it by half again.
The 2024 figure comes with a footnote I liked a lot. Part of that year's investment, the report says, "n'a pas été incluse dans le total présenté": it was left out of the total, because some operations weren't finished by the production companies in 2024 and were carried over into 2025. It's the sort of sentence you only find in an accounting document written by people who expect someone to check.
The biggest single line in seven years is Gladiator II, which spent 306 million dirhams in Morocco in 2023. Ridley Scott was back in the country where he'd shot much of the first film, the country where Aït Benhaddou has played Rome, Jerusalem and Yunkai. Second is the eighth season of Homeland, 267 million in 2019. Third is a title that doesn't exist yet: "Charlie's Tale," a feature listed in 2025 as British, serviced by Zak Productions, 252 million dirhams. In the rebate table a few pages later the same row reads "Charlie's Tale (The Odyssey)". It's Christopher Nolan's film, under its working title, and it accounts for a fifth of everything foreign productions spent in Morocco that year.
Working titles are all over the ledger, because productions shoot under code names to keep crowds and paparazzi away, and the film centre records whatever name the paperwork had. "Unt Merc Series (Episodes: 1 & 2)," American, 234 million dirhams in 2025. "The New Eve," German, 140 million in 2024; a year later the rebate table calls it "Zero A.D." Reading the ledger is partly a game of matching code names to releases, and you lose it more often than you'd like.
Once you stop looking at the famous rows and look at the totals, three things stand out.
The first is that most of the money isn't film. In 2025, television series accounted for 58% of foreign spending in Morocco, and feature films for 35%. In 2019 the series share was higher still: 504 million dirhams of 796 million. The image of Morocco as the backlot of the desert epic is a cinema-era image.
The second is that most of it isn't American. Productions the report lists as British spent around 470 million dirhams in Morocco in 2025, against 376 million for productions listed as American and 162 million for German ones. These are the nationalities of the producing companies, not of the audiences, but they're a fair map of who books the country.
The third is that a remarkable share of it goes through one door. Of the ten biggest foreign productions in Morocco since 2019, six were serviced by the same company, Kasbah Films in Tangier: two seasons' worth of Atomic, The Terminal List, the second season of The Wheel of Time, Convoy, The New Eve. For a sense of what "a foreign shoot" means on the ground, the film centre also counts shooting authorisations: 586 for foreign productions in 2025, against 110 rows in the spending list. Most authorisations are for news crews, TV programmes and small shoots. The money is concentrated in a few dozen productions, and those productions are concentrated in a few service companies.
What the rebate costs and what it buys
One caveat before the numbers, because it matters. The tables don't show bank transfers. The 2022 report lists support "accordé", granted, "au titre de l'année 2022", for that year: eight foreign productions, 41.9 million dirhams. From 2023 the heading changes to "Productions ayant reçu le Cash Rebate", productions that received the rebate that year, with the amount of support granted to each. On that basis, ten productions received 109.1 million dirhams in 2023, twelve received 145.7 million in 2024, and twenty-four received 243.8 million in 2025, on budgets of 994.5 million dirhams spent in the country. The scheme more than doubled in two years, as the rate rose from 20% to 30% and more productions applied. A separate table lists the productions with an agreement in principle, money promised but not yet received: 309 million dirhams requested by twenty more productions in 2025.
Measured against those full in-country budgets, the rebates came to about 18% in 2023, 23% in 2024 and 24.5% in 2025. That doesn't mean Morocco is paying less than it advertises. The 30% applies to eligible spending, which excludes part of what a production lays out, so the gap between the two is built into the rules. But it gives you the number that the headline rate never does: for every dirham of rebate Morocco reports for 2025, about four dirhams were spent in the country by the productions that received it.
Whether that's a good deal, the ledger can't settle on its own. It doesn't tell you how much of that spending would have happened without the rebate, or how much of it stayed in Morocco once the hotels and caterers and equipment houses had paid their own bills. Abu Dhabi says, citing independently verified research, that "for every dirham paid through the scheme, more than three dirhams flows back into the economy." Morocco's figure measures something narrower, and the two aren't the same calculation. The difference is that you can check Morocco's.
It's worth setting those numbers next to the rest of Morocco's film economy, which is in the same report. In 2025, Moroccans bought 2.19 million cinema tickets, across 87 active screens in the whole country, for 129.8 million dirhams. Foreign productions spent more than nine times that in Morocco in the same year. The two aren't parts of one market, since foreign spending includes TV series, commercials and corporate films as well as features, but the gap gives you the scale. And the main fund that advances money to Moroccan productions, the avance sur recettes, has awarded 73.5 million dirhams a year in each of the last four years. In 2025 the rebates foreign productions received came to a little over three times that.
That isn't necessarily a scandal. The two are different instruments with different jobs: one buys foreign spending, the other builds a national cinema.
Everyone else
Here is what the rest of the region publishes, as far as I could find, with every figure traced to the body that released it or to a report that quotes it.
Saudi Arabia publishes its box office in detail, which makes sense for a commercial cinema market that reopened in 2018 after a long gap: that year's receipts were 38.6 million riyals. In 2025 they were 920.8 million riyals, from 18.8 million tickets across 62 cinemas and 603 screens, broken down region by region. Riyadh alone took 434.4 million, close to half the country. Saudi films took 122.6 million riyals from eleven releases. On the rebate side, the public figures are cumulative and soft: more than a billion riyals of production spending across incentivised projects between 2020 and 2024, domestic and foreign together, about 1,230 jobs a year. Box office tells you how the cinema market is doing, not how the rebate is managed, and on the rebate I found no annual payment figures and no list of productions. I should add that I read the Saudi figures through news reports quoting the Saudi Film Commission's annual reports; the commission's own sites wouldn't load from where I was working.
The UAE's box office is reported nationally: more than 734 million dirhams in 2025, from more than 14.8 million tickets. Abu Dhabi, the emirate actually paying rebates, publishes something else. It counts productions supported since 2013: 140 by June 2023, 180 by May 2025. It counts people with real care. Dune: Part Two: 27 shooting days, 300 local crew, 250 international crew, 500 extras. F1: 29 days across three shoots, 284 local crew. Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One: 15 days, 125 local freelance crew, 250 extras. The three-dirhams-for-one line came with the announcement of the 35% rate, attributed to "independently verified research", but I couldn't find the study itself published. In the public material I could find, Abu Dhabi gave no dirham figure for the amount spent or refunded on any single production.
Jordan has hosted, by its film commission's count, 115 foreign films and 29 international series, many of them in Wadi Rum, the valley that keeps playing Mars. In September 2023 its film commission put spending on Jordan's film industry at $519 million. In May 2025, nearly two years later, it put spending by the creative industries sector at the same $519 million. The statements I found don't say whether the estimate was revised or carried forward.
Turkey publishes more than most, through its culture ministry's annual activity reports. It has offered up to 30% to foreign productions since 2019. The ministry's own counts of foreign feature films given permission to shoot are 17 in 2019, 17 again in 2021 and 2022, and 12 in 2024; for 2025 the ministry reports ten foreign productions. Meanwhile Turkish cinema attendance, according to the national statistics office, fell from 68.5 million in 2017 to 27.7 million in 2025.
Qatar's scheme is too new for a comparable public record of payments to have emerged. For Egypt I couldn't find publicly accessible official figures on box office or on foreign shoots. Tunisia's statistics office publishes cinema attendance up to 2022, and Oman's published cinema statistics for 2020 and 2021. For Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Syria and Yemen I couldn't find comparable public figures at all, which says as much about what's online and searchable as about what exists in ministry files.
So the map, reduced to one question, looks like this. Who tells you what the rebate has gone to, year by year, production by production? Morocco. Who tells you something cumulative, or counts people instead of money? Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, Jordan. Who has no publicly documented rebate comparable to these schemes? Egypt and Tunisia, as far as I could find, and that says nothing about the strength of their film cultures. Who has a rebate and almost no public results? Turkey, partly, and Qatar, so far.
Why the receipts are the pitch
It's easy to read all of this as a story about transparency for its own sake, and there's something to that: rebates are public money, and public money is supposed to leave a trail. But I think the more useful way to read it is commercial.
When a line producer compares 60% in one country with 30% in another, they aren't comparing two numbers. They're comparing two promises, and the thing that makes a promise credible is evidence that it's been kept, at scale, to productions like theirs, recently. Morocco's report, typos and working titles and missing 100,000 dirhams included, is that evidence. It says: twenty-four foreign productions received the rebate last year, here are their names, here are the amounts, here's the company that serviced them. Anyone thinking of shooting there can read it. Anyone thinking of shooting somewhere else, as far as I could find, has no public equivalent to read.
Economists have names for this. In the previous piece in this series, about why a two-hour Alpine transfer can cost more than a flight, the problem was the one George Akerlof described as the market for "lemons": the buyer can't see quality in advance, so trust ends up priced in. Film incentives have the same asymmetry, except that the seller is a government and the thing the buyer can't see is whether it will pay. Michael Spence's answer, in his work on signalling, was that a signal only persuades if it's expensive to fake. A 60% headline costs a press release. A table of every payment, by production, year after year, is something a commission that didn't pay couldn't publish without being caught.
This is the same thing I keep running into in cultural data generally. The institutions that publish structured, checkable records about themselves end up being the ones that get understood, compared and chosen, by people and increasingly by machines. The ones that publish announcements end up being taken on faith, or not at all. A film commission is a cultural institution like any other in that respect. Its rate is its headline. Its ledger is its reputation.
Dune: Part Three comes out in December. Thanks to Abu Dhabi, we know how many people drove its trucks, how many residents stood in its crowds, how many interns it took on. How much of the emirate's money went into it, I couldn't find anywhere public.
How I did this: Morocco's figures come from the Centre Cinématographique Marocain's annual reports for 2019–2025. I re-added the spending and rebate tables against the reports' own totals; the shares, ratios and rankings are my calculations from them. Rebate rules come from official film-commission documents and government releases. Saudi box-office figures are from the Saudi Film Commission's annual reports as quoted by Argaam and Riyadh Daily, because the commission's own site could not be reached. Turkish attendance figures are TÜİK's, as reported in the Turkish press. Every reported figure links to its source; calculated shares, ratios and comparisons are identified as mine in the text.