Gromit Yes they will stream films in Saudi, but that is not the point. The point is that people will be allowed to socialise in public at the cinema. At present there is no place at all where females can meet other women or other non family members to chat and socialise.
Men have always been allowed in coffee shops and restaurants on their own and can meet other men.
Douglas9401 Mecca as a trading name of an entertainment venue was banned many years ago. Mecca is the most holy city of Islam and you can not have people using the name for a gambling and drinking den. Christians are not even allowed to enter the city limits of Mecca it is for Muslims only, there is a bypass around the city for them, it is popularly called 'The Christian Bypass'
naomi, Khobar or Al Khobar was the nearest town to me when I lived in Saudi , I went there shopping at least once a week. No cinema or even an old cinema then 1982 to 1984.
We had 2 cinemas on the Aramco camp in Dhahran where I lived.
Films were just not worth watching though, any form of contact between a male and a female was cut out, not just sexual contact , any contact even a touch of the hands was cut out.Any sort of violence or aggression was cut out as well. As you can imagine most films were very short and did not make sense after all the censorship.
Newspapers were censored as well , any mention of sex ,or Israel was cut out, we got papers imported but by the time they went on sale they looked like a paper doily that you put a cake on , full of holes. If you went to the library to look at a map in an atlas, the page of the middle east map had an Israel shaped hole cut out of it.