Once upon a time, countries projected power with battleships.
Then came airlines, skyscrapers, national museums, Olympic Games and impossibly expensive airports.
Now the next global competition may involve roller coasters, anime, esports, concerts and video games.
Welcome to the geopolitics of fun.
In August, France and Saudi Arabia announced plans for a €6-billion entertainment development near Paris inspired by the Japanese manga and anime franchise Dragon Ball Z.
The project, planned near Cergy-Pontoise northwest of Paris, could eventually include three theme parks and create around 22,000 jobs. Saudi entertainment and investment company Qiddiya is expected to finance the development, although important details remain to be worked out and construction would take years.
Even the origin story sounds like something invented over dinner.
The idea reportedly emerged after French President Emmanuel Macron and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman discovered they shared an enthusiasm for Dragon Ball Z.
Two national leaders.
One Japanese anime franchise.
A €6-billion amusement park.
International relations have certainly become more entertaining.
But look beyond the novelty and something much bigger is happening.
Countries are beginning to understand that entertainment can do something extraordinarily powerful.
It can make people like you.
From Soft Power to Play Power
Diplomats have understood soft power for decades.
A country that exports culture can influence how people around the world perceive it without issuing a single political statement.
Hollywood did it for the United States.
The Beatles did it for Britain.
Italian fashion did it for Italy.
French cuisine did it for France.
Japan did it with anime, manga, video games and characters.
South Korea has done it spectacularly through K-pop, television, film, beauty and food.
The difference now is that governments and sovereign investment funds are increasingly treating entertainment not simply as culture that happens organically, but as infrastructure worth building and industries worth owning.
Saudi Arabia may be the most aggressive example.
Its transformation strategy includes enormous investments in tourism, sport, gaming, esports and entertainment as part of the country’s effort to diversify an economy historically dominated by oil.
Qiddiya City, under development outside Riyadh, is being positioned as a city built around play.
Plans include hundreds of attractions, theme parks, sporting venues, a massive gaming and esports district, motorsport facilities, entertainment spaces and what is billed as the world’s only dedicated Dragon Ball theme park.
Six Flags Qiddiya City is part of the plan.
So is a gaming and esports district designed to host major international competitions and attract global gaming companies.
The interesting part isn’t any single attraction.
It’s the ecosystem.
Saudi Arabia isn’t merely trying to convince people to vacation there.
It is trying to become part of the global entertainment conversation.
Owning the Game
Gaming demonstrates how ambitious that strategy has become.
Through the Public Investment Fund, Saudi Arabia has built Savvy Games Group into a major global gaming player.
Its portfolio already includes Scopely, the mobile games company behind some of the world’s biggest titles, and ESL FACEIT Group, a major force in competitive gaming and esports.
Saudi Arabia has also turned Riyadh into the home of the Esports World Cup.
The 2025 edition attracted more than three million visitors to championship events and generated hundreds of millions of views globally.
That’s tourism.
But it is also branding.
A teenager in Brazil watching an esports final may have no particular interest in Saudi history, Saudi politics or Saudi Arabia as a travel destination.
But suddenly Riyadh exists in their world.
That’s the power of entertainment.
It introduces a country through something people already love.
The same principle has worked elsewhere for years.
Japan Figured This Out Early
Japan doesn’t need to explain the concept.
Ask a group of people in their twenties what first made them interested in Japan and answers may include Pokémon, Nintendo, Studio Ghibli, manga, anime or video games long before temples or bullet trains enter the conversation.
The Japanese government openly recognizes this.
Anime, manga, fashion and other forms of pop culture are used as tools of cultural diplomacy, designed to increase understanding of Japan, improve the country’s image and encourage tourism.
Japan is now going even further by connecting film locations, anime settings and other entertainment content directly with regional tourism.
The logic is wonderfully simple.
Watch something.
Love it.
Want to see where it came from.
Book the flight.
A fictional world creates a very real tourism economy.
South Korea Turned Fandom Into Arrivals
South Korea may offer the clearest evidence that entertainment can move people physically across borders.
K-pop fans don’t merely stream Korean music.
They travel.
Research surrounding major BTS concerts in Korea this year found that international visitors attending performances stayed an average of 8.7 days and spent about 3.53 million won per person.
That is an extraordinary ripple effect from a concert.
The ticket may be the reason for the trip.
But visitors also need hotel rooms.
They eat in restaurants.
They shop.
They visit attractions.
They take trains.
They buy skincare.
They hunt down filming locations.
They visit cafés associated with their favourite stars.
They discover Seoul, Busan and increasingly other parts of the country.
Entertainment becomes the top of a tourism funnel.
And once that happens, governments pay attention.
Why Build a Landmark When You Can Build a Fandom?
Traditional tourism development often centred around physical icons.
Build the tallest tower.
Construct the biggest museum.
Open the grandest hotel.
Create something sufficiently impressive that people will come to look at it.
Entertainment works differently.
It arrives with an audience already attached.
Dragon Ball has fans.
Pokémon has fans.
Formula One has fans.
K-pop groups have fans.
Video games have fans.
Football clubs have fans.
Bring the thing people love to your destination and you don’t necessarily have to convince them to care about the destination first.
Their fandom does the work.
This may explain why entertainment intellectual property is becoming so valuable in tourism development.
A new roller coaster is an attraction.
A Dragon Ball roller coaster is a story.
And the story already has millions of people emotionally invested in it.
There Is Another Side to the Strategy
Of course, cultural influence is never politically neutral.
Saudi Arabia’s huge investments in sport and entertainment have also generated criticism, particularly from groups that argue global events and celebrity-driven attractions can improve the country’s international image while distracting attention from its human-rights record.
The term “sportswashing” has become part of the global vocabulary as Saudi investment has expanded across football, golf, motorsport and other sports.
Similar questions increasingly apply to entertainment.
Supporters see economic diversification, jobs, tourism, cultural exchange and an enormous expansion of entertainment options inside a country whose leisure economy was once far more restricted.
Critics see image management alongside investment.
Both things can exist at the same time.
Soft power has always worked this way.
Countries rarely spend billions projecting an image without caring what that image accomplishes.
The only thing changing is the medium.
The New National Brand May Be Something You Can Play
This is where the story becomes particularly interesting for travel.
Destinations used to sell scenery.
Then they sold experiences.
Now some are building entire entertainment universes.
A family might someday fly to Riyadh because their children want to enter the world of Dragon Ball.
A gamer might travel there for an esports championship.
Someone else goes for Formula One.
Another visitor comes for a concert.
The destination becomes the stage on which dozens of global subcultures meet.
And the competition is spreading.
Cities want film festivals.
Countries want sporting events.
Tourism boards chase concert tours.
Governments promote gaming industries.
Destinations construct theme parks around globally recognized characters.
Entertainment companies become tourism partners.
The dividing line between cultural policy, economic development and tourism is becoming harder to find.
Whoever Owns the Fun Owns the Attention
That may ultimately be what countries are competing for.
Attention.
In a world where people can watch almost anything, play anything and discover anywhere without leaving the sofa, simply telling someone that your country is interesting isn’t enough.
You have to enter their world first.
Japan entered it through anime.
South Korea entered through K-pop and television.
The United States has spent a century doing it through Hollywood.
Saudi Arabia is attempting something different: investing enormous amounts of capital to become both a destination for global entertainment and an owner, investor and host within the industries producing it.
The €6-billion project outside Paris makes that ambition particularly striking.
Saudi entertainment investment would no longer be confined to attracting the world to Saudi Arabia.
It would be helping build what Europeans do for fun in Europe.
That’s a very different kind of global influence.
The great powers of the last century built fleets, factories and financial centres.
The rising cultural powers of this one may build fandoms.
And increasingly, the new global arms race isn’t only about who has the most money, technology or military hardware.
It may also be about who can build the place everyone wants to play.
