Theaters in Egypt saw a high turnout as people flocked to watch movies during the Eid al-Fitr season, which started July 17. Five new movies are currently vying for the top-grossing spot: “Welad Rizk,” starring Ahmed Ezz; “Hayati Mbahdalah,” starring Mohamed Saad; “Sekkar Morr;” “Nawm al-Talat,” starring Hani Ramzi; and “Shad Ajza,” starring Mohammed Ramadan.
All five movies had high production costs amounting to approximately 84 million Egyptian pounds (about $10.5 million) in total. The Egyptian state did not contribute to the funding of any of them, despite producers’ concerns before Eid al-Fitr over possible low turnout because of the large number of terrorist operations that plagued the country during Ramadan. Chief among those was the bombing of the Italian Consulate in the center of the country July 11 as well as the assassination of Attorney General Hisham Barakat on June 29. There was also the July 1 attack on the Egyptian armed forces in North Sinai by Wilayat Sinai, in addition to the targeting of theaters — the Radubis Cinema on Al-Haram Street in Giza was bombed twice. The first theater attack occurred in January 2014 and killed one person, and the suspect accused of bombing the cinema confessed to being linked to Wilayat Sinai and said that targeting theaters is designed to kill the police officers guarding them. The second bombing occurred July 17, 2015.
