Watching 'The Penguin' Premiere With Anghami Founder Elie Habib

On September 19th, we had the opportunity to watch the regional premiere of 'The Penguin' in Dubai with Elie Habib, the CTO and co-founder of music platform Anghami, which merged with streaming service OSN+ earlier this year.

A limited series based on the 'Gotham' universe, 'The Penguin' takes place shortly after the final season of 'Gotham' as Oswald Cobblepot - a violent gangster and notorious Batman villain played by Colin Farrell - navigates the city's criminal underworld. The 'Gotham' series had always been more grounded in its depiction of its villains (at least, compared to most superhero properties, anyway), with a focus on crime families, their turf wars, and the bloody politics underlying their competing enterprises.

The premiere event at Roxy Cinema embraced the aesthetics of the urban underworld, transforming the lobby into Oswald’s nightclub, The Iceberg Lounge, complete with a little (temporary) tattoo parlour and a photo opportunity behind a window that’s been shot-up gang-style. We were then corralled into the theatre to watch the premiere, with caramel popcorn and candy that has been themed after Drops (one of the, uh, premiere products made by the series’ crime families).

The first episode of 'The Penguin' sets the tone immediately; in the aftermath of the Riddler's large-scale terrorist attack, Oswald slinks off into the shadows and digs for material that would help him get a leg-up in the Maroni crime family. The episode keeps the stakes small while raising the tension to its limit. It's more 'The Sopranos' than 'Justice League', focusing on smaller people in a crazier and more supernatural world, which plays right into the strengths of director Craig Zobel ('One Dollar', 'The Leftovers', 'Z for Zachariah'). As a first episode, it's a tautly written narrative, and while it does assume you already know what happens in 'Gotham', the exposition does its job to introduce you to its setting and establish Oswald's place in it even if you know nothing about it.

That said, while it may be able to stand on its own particularly in future episodes, 'The Penguin' is very much strapped to its context, which is to say, its position within the larger 'Batman' franchise. Not that that's a bad thing. In fact it ties right into what OSN+ has planned for its platform as a whole.

"One of the sells of OSN+ is that 'We bring Hollywood to you'," Elie Habib tells CairoScene. "When it comes to bringing new content to the platform, we focus primarily on content that people really want, both Arabic and foreign. We have licences with HBO and Warner Bros. Their content comes in high demand and they are high quality, and we know they come from a source that is consistent in that quality."

As though to flex its access to exclusive content that can be difficult to find on other streaming platforms within the MENA region, OSN+ celebrated Batman Day on September 21st by showcasing a slew of the Caped Crusader's most popular films and features just one day after the Middle East premiere of 'The Penguin', from classics like 'Batman' (1989), 'Batman Returns' (1992) and 'Batman Forever' (1995), more contemporary releases like 'The Dark Knight' (2008), 'Justice League' (2017) and 'Batman' (2022), and even animated favourites like 'The Lego Batman Movie' (2017) and 'Batman: The Long Halloween' (2021).

These offerings reflect the new philosophy OSN+ adopted ever since it merged with Anghami in April 2024. “I’ve always loved movies, even more than music,” Habib says. “By combining these platforms, we’re trying to create a multimedia experience that caters and competes for people’s attention. We merged Anghami with OSN+ because we think about the users and how they use their time.”

These considerations also take into account the different behaviours amongst their audiences. For example, according to Habib, the average person spends 50 minutes at a time on their phone (and not particularly on any single app), while they spend two hours at a time watching their TV. However, when you isolate the younger audience in that statistic, their findings suggest that the next generation is clearly more phone-focused.

“We’re intent on implementing technology and staying up to date, but in a way that makes sense,” Habib says. “Anghami users don’t want ChatGPT on their app to help them write a diary entry, but we can instead use AI to help tune the platform and the algorithm, make small adjustments to a track for people who are unable to hear certain parts of it, and so on.”

In the end, what distinguishes Anghami and OSN+ are the considerations that are specific to the MENA region. “On Anghami the first thing we did as we expanded is collect and buy licences for, and digitise, the content that comes from and is relevant to that area,” Habib continues. “When we expanded to Sudan, for example, we found Sudanese artists, tracks and old cassettes that had never been digitised, and we helped preserve them on our platform.”

Since the merger, the thoroughness that defined Anghami has been carried over to OSN+. Just as they’ve delved as deeply as they can into Batman and DC’s many films and series, OSN+ is making sure their audiences are able to dive as far into their favourite franchises as possible, with high-profile films like ‘Dune’ and ‘Dune 2’ being followed up with content like the upcoming series ‘Dune: Prophecy’. They’re also keeping their eyes on offerings from within the region, with plans to release their own OSN series soon, helping build on the Arab world’s burgeoning media scene as directly as possible.

Whether it’s elevating content from the MENA region or letting us watch the Penguin take over the city of Gotham, the merger between OSN+ and Anghami has seen these platforms taken to a new level. But what’s next for this newly transformed service? “We’ve had our eye on content from other regions, particularly Turkiye,” Habib says. “In the end, it’s all about recognising the priority of what people want, what is reliable in terms of quality, and making sure we curate content that will grab your attention and keep it.”