Saudi-owned Middle East television network giant, MBC will co-produce, co-finance Gerard Butler's upcoming action thriller Kandahar. A report on The Hollywood Reporter said that the film will be based on an undercover CIA agent whose classified mission gets leaked while working in the Middle East. The entire film will be shot in Saudi Arabia. MBC Studios will be making a substantial investment in the film.
It had been first announced at the virtual Cannes market in 2020 that the Kandahar-based action thriller will reunite Gerard Butler with director Ric Roman Waugh, with whom he had earlier worked in films such as Greenland, Angel Has Fallen. The report further mentioned that Waugh directs from the self-written screenplay. He wrote the script of the Kandahar-based film with former military intelligence officer Mitchell LaFortune.
About the Saudi based project
The film will be based on LaForetune's experience at the Defense Intelligence Agency in Afghanistan. The timeline will also match with the event when Edward Snowden had leaked information about the US National Security Agency. Gerard Butler will play the role of the undercover CIA agent who's a classified mission, identity gets exposed. He gets trapped in a hostile territory from where he must fight his way out of the desert till the point of extraction.
The Gerard Butler starrer film is expected to be shot later in 2021, in Saudi Arabia AIUIA region which had been recently launched as the new film destination. The Hollywood Reporter further stated that the action thriller will also be produced by Thunder Road Films' Basil Iwanyk and Erica Lee, G-Base's Alan Siegel and Butler, and Christian Mercuri.
The Capstone Group, which is also co-financing, handled international sales in Cannes, where the film sold internationally, including major territories such as France (Metropolitan) and Germany (Leonine). Rob Moran will be the executive producer along with Brendon Boyea and Jonathan Fuhrman.
