Guy Ritchie swaps gangsters for gloves in bloody £1m trailer for Anthony Joshua fight

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

If this all sounds like the gruesome finale to a Guy Ritchie movie, that’s because it is. In a way.

Because the Hollywood director is indeed behind the footage released almost two weeks ago showing Joshua and his fellow boxers meeting a gruesome end. But it is not a gangster film, but a promotion for one of the biggest nights of British sporting history at Wembley this Saturday. Titled Touching handsThe nearly four-minute clip is also a genre-bending mini-musical, in which the murdered characters rise from the dead and perform a moving — and not entirely awful — rendition Sweet Caroline before they headed to the ring to fight their boxing matches.

Hiring someone of Ritchie’s stature to publicize an event headlined by Joshua’s heavyweight title fight with Dubois may seem like a huge accomplishment, but it’s also the logical conclusion to Saudi Arabia’s takeover of much of the elite side of the sport.

The organization is headed by Turki Alalshikh, head of the National Entertainment Authority (GEA) and an advisor to the royal court, including the de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Until recently, the aim of the takeover was to help organize the biggest boxing fights and bring them to the kingdom.

But now he’s adopting the “Riyadh Season” brand, with many of those fights taking place away from home, especially at Wembley. And it’s Riyadh Season and the names of other Saudi sponsors that are written all over the boxing ring in Ritchie’s film, as well as in the credits.

Touching handsThe film, which experts estimate would have cost more than £1 million to produce, is just the latest in a series of increasingly long and undoubtedly increasingly expensive advertising campaigns funded by GEA over the past year to promote the season’s fights in Riyadh.

The first, from October’s “Battle of the Worst” between Tyson Fury and former Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) champion Francis Ngannou, was titled “Rumble.” The 96-second ad was based on the two fighters disturbing each other by creating shockwaves from a distance to the tune of Betty Chung’s cover of the 1968 Cher song. Boom, boom.

Then there was a December promotion inspired by a zombie movie Day of Reckoning and Joshua’s fights against Otto Wallin and Deontay Wilder against Joseph Parker.

February brought two premieres: a cowboy-gladiator-pirate combo for Fury Ring of Fire undisputed heavyweight world title against Oleksandr Usyk and a tribute to the classic video game Street Fighter II for Joshua Knockout chaos clash with Francis Ngannou.

And in the love letter that undoubtedly helped seduce one of Britain’s greatest directors, there was an advertisement for the film April 5 out of 5 resorted to imitation as the sincerest form of flattery, casting top promoters Eddie Hearn and Frank Warren in a sketch in which they paired boxers for fights much as the East End gangsters in Ritchie’s film chose accomplices for a robbery.

“It is virtually impossible to make them financially viable”

Collectively, the ads have garnered tens of millions of views on Alalshikha’s social media channels and elsewhere. Hearn, who also appeared in a cameo role as a zombie in Day of Reckoning announcement, said Sports Telegraph The GEA chairman personally initiated a revolution in the publicity of fights, which for decades had been based on trash talk and sometimes staged fights during confrontations.

“It’s really his idea,” Hearn said. “Although there are creative people working on it at Riyadh Season, he’s the one pushing to do something different in that space.”

Money seems to be no object, with Hearn predicting that such promotions will only deepen Saudi interest in boxing, which has so far proved to be a largely loss-making venture.

“The Wembley show will be fine financially: 96,000 people, huge pay-per-view viewership,” he said.

“But of course, when they organize big shows like Fury-Usyk in Riyadh, it is practically impossible to make them financially profitable.”

Hearn said it was “not a cause for serious concern” given the Saudis’ desire to “attract spectators to Riyadh and host major sporting events, make the Riyadh season a major attraction,” acknowledging that it could ultimately benefit the kingdom’s economy as a whole.

He added about Alalshikh: “And there is a real love for boxing in His Excellency. He loves the sport. He also has a great knowledge of it. He has a really deep passion for it.”

That passion has not shielded Alalshikh from accusations leveled at Saudi Arabia that the real reason for the kingdom’s multibillion-dollar investment in sports such as boxing, soccer, golf and Formula One is to divert attention from its poor human rights record.

“The film is a pale shadow of the grim reality of life in Saudi Arabia”

Like the fighters and promoters who worked with Alalshikh, Ritchie’s decision to direct Touching hands It was therefore not without some degree of reputational risk for the Briton.

Felix Jakens, head of priority campaigns and people at risk at Amnesty International UK, said: “Guy Ritchie’s film may be dark, even gory, but it is a pale shadow of the grim reality of arrests, torture, fake trials and public executions in Saudi Arabia.

“It would be refreshing, and would go some way to bursting the bubble of Saudi whitewashing of sports, if Anthony Joshua, Daniel Dubois and Guy Ritchie admitted that this fight was part of Saudi whitewashing of sports and spoke out about the need for human rights reform in Saudi Arabia.”

Ritchie could not be reached for comment. Touching handsincluding whether he will direct the next promotional video for the Riyadh season.

Others involved in the ad were also unavailable, including Alalshikh, who has previously responded to allegations of “sportwashing” by speaking out to critics, emphasising his own qualifications and claiming that investment from Saudi Arabia is no different from that in other parts of the world.

And with the Fury-Usyk II fight set to be the next mega boxing event in December, he is no doubt already planning to top Touching hands with its latest promotional spot – regardless of who directs it.

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