Guy Ritchie’s gory Anthony Joshua trailer shows how Saudi money has transformed boxing adverts

Anthony Joshua lies motionless in a pool of blood as Daniel Dubois convulses in an electrified bathtub. Willy Hutchinson is slumped in a chair with a polythene bag over his head, while a flaming car tyre binds a badly burned Tyler Denny, and a frozen Hamzah Sheeraz hangs upside down in a meat locker. Each man appears to be dead.

If all this sounds like the gruesome climax to a Guy Ritchie movie then that is because it is. Sort of.

For the Hollywood director is indeed behind footage released a fortnight ago showing Joshua and his fellow boxers meeting a grisly end. Yet, this is no gangster film but a promo for one of British sport’s biggest nights of the year at Wembley this Saturday. Titled Touching Hands, the near four-minute clip is also a genre-bending mini-musical in which its murdered protagonists rise from the dead and break into a haunting – and not wholly awful – rendition of Sweet Caroline before levitating towards a ring for their respective boxing matches.

Recruiting someone of Ritchie’s stature to hype an event headlined by Joshua’s heavyweight world title fight with Dubois may appear a major coup but it is also the logical conclusion of the effective takeover of much of the elite end of the sport by Saudi Arabia.

Fronted by Turki Alalshikh, the head of the country’s General Authority for Entertainment (GEA) and an adviser to a royal court including de facto ruler Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, that takeover has until recently focused on helping make boxing’s biggest fights and bringing them to the kingdom.

But now he is taking the ‘Riyadh Season’ brand under which many of these fights are staged on the road, most notably to Wembley. And it is Riyadh Season and the names of other Saudi sponsors that are plastered all over the boxing ring featured in Ritchie’s film, as well as in the end credits.

Touching Hands, which experts believe would have cost more than £1 million to make, is also merely the latest in a succession of increasingly long, and no doubt ever-more-expensive, promos bankrolled by the GEA in the past year hyping Riyadh Season fight nights.

The first, for last October’s ‘Battle of the Baddest’ between Tyson Fury and former Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) champion Francis Ngannou, was entitled ‘Rumble’. The 96-second advert was themed around the two fighters disturbing each other’s peace by unleashing shockwaves from afar to the tune of Betty Chung’s 1968 cover of Cher’s Bang Bang.

That was followed by a zombie-movie-inspired promo for December’s Day of Reckoning and the bouts between Joshua and Otto Wallin, and Deontay Wilder and Joseph Parker.

February brought two offerings, a cowboy, gladiator and pirate-movie mash-up for Fury’s Ring of Fire undisputed heavyweight world title fight against Oleksandr Usyk.

And a homage to the classic video game Street Fighter II for Joshua’s Knockout Chaos clash with Francis Ngannou.

And in what was a love letter that doubtless helped woo one of Britain’s biggest directors, the ad for April’s 5 vs 5 resorted to imitation as the sincerest form of flattery by casting top promoters Eddie Hearn and Frank Warren in a skit that saw them pair boxers for fights like East End gangsters from a Ritchie movie might select henchmen for a heist.

‘It’s virtually impossible to make massive shows financially viable’

Between them, the promos have garnered tens of millions of views on Alalshikh’s social media channels and elsewhere.

Hearn, who also had a cameo as a zombie in the Day of Reckoning ad, told Telegraph Sport the GEA chairman had personally driven what appears to be a revolution in the hyping of fights that for decades was overly reliant on trash-talk and sometimes stage-managed brawls during face-offs.

“It’s his brainchild, really,” Hearn said. “Although there are creative people at Riyadh Season working on it, it is him who’s pushing doing something different in that space.”

And it appears money is no object, with Hearn forecasting such promos would compound a move into boxing by the Saudis that has largely proven a loss-making endeavour to date.

“The Wembley show will be OK, because of the financials: 96,000 people, huge pay-per-views,” he said.

“But, obviously, when they’re doing massive shows like Fury-Usyk in Riyadh, it’s virtually impossible to make them financially viable.”

Hearn said that was “not of major concern” amid a drive by the Saudis to “bring eyeballs to Riyadh and bring major sporting events to Riyadh, make Riyadh Season a major attraction”, something he acknowledged could ultimately benefit the kingdom’s wider economy.

He added of Alalshikh: “And there is a genuine love for boxing from His Excellency. He loves the sport. He’s very knowledgeable about it as well. He’s got a really deep passion for it.”

That passion has failed to prevent Alalshikh being caught up in accusations against Saudi Arabia that the true motive for the kingdom’s multi-billion-pound investment in the likes of boxing, football, golf and Formula One is to distract from its poor human rights record.

‘Film is a pale shadow of the grim reality of Saudi life’

Like those fighters and promoters to have worked with Alalshikh, Ritchie’s decision to direct Touching Hands was therefore not without a degree of reputational risk for the Briton.

Felix Jakens, Amnesty International UK’s Head of Priority Campaigns and Individuals at Risk, said: “Guy Ritchie’s film may be dark and even gory, but it’s a pale shadow of the grim reality of arrests, torture, sham trials and public executions in Saudi Arabia.

“It would be refreshing and go some way to puncturing the Saudi sportswashing balloon if Anthony Joshua, Daniel Dubois and Guy Ritchie acknowledged the way this fight fits into Saudi sportswashing and spoke out about the need for human rights reform in Saudi Arabia.”

Ritchie was unavailable for comment on Touching Hands, including whether he might end up directing another Riyadh Season promo.

Others involved in the ad were also unavailable, including Alalshikh, who has previously responded to insinuations of sportswashing by speaking openly to critics, underlining his own credentials, and arguing investment from Saudi is no different from that elsewhere on the planet.

And with Fury-Usyk II set to be boxing’s next mega-event in December, he is no doubt already planning to top Touching Hands with his latest promo – whoever ends up directing it.