MBC Studios is gearing up for a 2026 release of Hana Alomair’s Traveller’s Hell following the trials of a young woman who unwittingly picks up a serial killer posing as a stranded motorist on a remote mountain road.

First announced in 2024, it is is a landmark production for MBC Studios, both for its female driven genre storyline and as the first feature for pioneering Saudi director Alomair.

She previously co-wrote and directed Whispers, one of Netflix’s first original series with Saudi Arabia in the wake of the country opening up in 2017.  

It is among a trio of adaptations of bestselling writer Osamah Almuslim in the works at MBC Studios, highlighted in a release by the production arm of the MBC Group summing up its activities as it attended Cannes.

The division arrived in the festival after a bruising box office reception regionally and further afield for its $150m epic Desert Warrior, one of the first productions it got behind following the lifting of Saudi Arabia’s cinema ban in 2017.

The message from executives on the ground was that while that production had failed to deliver at the box office, it had provided valuable lessons as Saudi Arabia began building production capacity in earnest in the early 2000s.

MBC Studios is also gearing up for the shoot of Spider’s Web, its second feature adapted from Almuslim’s horror novel, in the fourth quarter of the year.

It follows a group of Saudi female students in Riyadh who begin to suspect that their mysterious neighbor is involved in something sinister, only to uncover an even more terrifying secret.

The division is also about to begin production on a third Almuslim adaptation, the fantasy television series Khawf (Fear), first announced in 2023.

Adapted from his bestselling novel of the same name, the story revolves around a young man who receives a strange book from a mysterious sheikh, setting off a chain of terrifying events once he begins reading it.

MBC Studios’ upcoming production slate also includes action-comedy film Mafiosos about two Saudi brothers who travel to Italy for business, only to find themselves entangled with the Italian mafia. The film is written by Saudi writers Nawaf Al-Muhanna and Hazem Al-Jaryan.

Further productions include Forever, a romantic love story written by Saudi actress and writer Sarah Taibah, who recently took acting, producing and co-writing credits on A Matter Of Life & death.

The group also teased plans for a new joint feature with Sattar and Mandoob production company Telfaz11 by the end of the year.

““Our focus remains on supporting local voices and building productions that reflect the richness, ambition, and diversity of Saudi storytelling,” said Samar Akrouk, Managing Director of MBC Studios and Group Director of Production at MBC Group.