Elie El Semaan’s first feature marries off two people who each want something else from the wedding, sends them to Lebanon, and in its first week on Netflix drew more views than any other film on the platform.

Honeymoonish (in Arabic, Shahr Zay al-Asal) is a 2024 Kuwaiti romantic comedy directed by Elie El Semaan and released on Netflix on 29 April 2024. Mahmoud Boushahri plays Hamad and Nour Al-Ghandour plays Noor, two strangers who agree to a rushed marriage for reasons they keep from each other. The film runs 100 minutes, is spoken in Kuwaiti Arabic and was produced by Eagle Films. Its honeymoon, and most of its story, takes place in Lebanon.

The setup: a wedding that suits two hidden plans

Hamad is a manager at his father’s investment company and is about to close a large contract with a German firm when his father, the company’s chief executive, stops the deal. The condition for restarting it is personal: Hamad must marry within four weeks and bring home the ultrasound of a grandchild, or be cut out of the inheritance, and with it his plan to found a company of his own. Hamad asks his friend Wael, played by Mahdi Barwiz, to find him a wife within a week.

Noor is a fitness trainer whose motto is that a woman should be strong, especially where men are concerned. She has been waiting for her boyfriend Youssef to propose; instead he leaves her and marries Aisha, a former classmate of hers. Noor asks her friend Amal, played by Ascia Al Faraj, to find her a husband quickly, one she can use to make Youssef jealous. Amal happens to be married to Wael, and the two problems appear to solve each other.

Neither is impressed by the other’s photograph. To Hamad, Noor looks like trouble; to Noor, Hamad looks far too traditional. They agree to a date anyway, say nothing about their real motives, marry, and fly to Lebanon for the honeymoon. Noor has chosen the destination for a reason: she believes Youssef and his new wife are staying at the same hotel.

Then Hamad receives news from his aunt and from Noor’s mother: the couple may be milk siblings, because they may have been nursed by the same woman as babies. Under Islamic family law that bond would make the marriage invalid, and nobody is sure whether it is true while the family investigates. Hamad keeps the news from Noor and spends the honeymoon finding ways to avoid intimacy, including trying to tire her out with sport. Noor, as it turns out, enjoys the activities, a hike in the Lebanese mountains among them. How the two plans collide, and how the story ends, is not spoiled here.

Who made it

Honeymoonish was the first feature film by Elie El Semaan, a Lebanese director. The screenplay is by Eiad Saleh and Ramy Ali, and the producer is Jamal Sannan for Eagle Films. Netflix presented it as a Kuwaiti romantic comedy built around a honeymoon full of hidden motives and second chances, and released it worldwide on that date.

Mahmoud Boushahri is a Kuwaiti actor known above all for his work in Gulf television drama. Nour Al-Ghandour is an Egyptian actress known in the region for television work across several genres: the romantic thriller Juman, the period student drama Beirut Class, set in 1964 Lebanon, and Ya Boadoh, in which she played Basma, a woman whose liberal values clash with her fiancé’s family. Before Honeymoonish, most of her roles leaned towards thrillers and melodrama rather than comedy.

The supporting cast includes a debut: Netflix highlighted that the role of Amal was the first on-screen part for Ascia Al Faraj a Kuwaiti fashion blogger and model. Mahdi Barwiz plays her husband Wael, Hamad’s friend and the couple’s secret matchmaker.

The film was shot in Lebanon, with Beirut among the locations, and the Lebanese setting is part of the premise rather than a backdrop chosen afterwards: the honeymoon trip is where the plan meets the lie. Its official song, Hayyo, was written, composed and performed by the singer Robert Al Asaad and released by Netflix MENA in May 2024, a few days after the premiere.

A Gulf rom-com by design

In the Gulf, the romantic comedy is a young genre on screen, and that was the director’s starting point. In interviews after the release, Elie El Semaan argued that the drama dominating regional television and streaming platforms was all action, killing and kidnapping, that audiences saw enough of that in real life, and that the region needed something lighter. He also set out his working rule for the genre: a romantic comedy cannot be entirely logical, or it stops being one, but it still has to stay grounded enough that viewers never ask how such a thing could ever happen.

The film’s building blocks are the classic ones: a relationship entered under false pretences, two people who start out unimpressed with each other, and a central lie that has to come out at some point. What is local is the obstacle. Milk kinship, the rule in Islamic law that children nursed by the same woman are related and cannot marry, is a real and familiar question in Gulf families, and it gives the story a complication that a Hollywood version of the same premise would not have. Nour Al-Ghandour described the film in the same period as a story about traditional marriages, mistaken identities and second chances.

The release was not free of controversy. When the poster and the trailer came out, there was a backlash on social media over the film’s suggestive tone, including a scenario in which Noor accidentally takes a Viagra pill. Elie El Semaan answered that the film had been judged from its poster before anyone had seen it, and that its only purpose was to entertain.

The numbers

Netflix’s own Top 10 data are the clearest record of what happened next. In its first week, from 29 April to 5 May 2024, Honeymoonish was the most-viewed non-English film on the platform worldwide, with 14 million views and 23.4 million hours watched. That same week, the most-viewed English-language film, Unfrosted, recorded 7.1 million views, so the Kuwaiti comedy drew roughly twice the audience of the top Hollywood title on the service.

The country lists show how far it travelled. In that first week, Honeymoonish was the number one film in 48 countries, among them Kuwait, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, France, Spain, Mexico, Austria, Belgium and Hungary, and it entered the national Top 10 in 73 countries in total. Regional press reported it as the first Arab film to reach number one on Netflix’s weekly chart of non-English films.

The audience then thinned out at the usual pace for a streaming release. The film was third in its second week, with 6.1 million views, and sixth in its third, with 2 million, for a total of about 22 million views in three weeks on the global list. In Kuwait it stayed in the national Top 10 for five weeks.

What came next

The result turned into a small production line. In November 2025, Netflix released Groom & Two Brides, a new Kuwait-set romantic comedy from the same director, the same writers, Eiad Saleh and Ramy Ali, and the same company, Eagle Films. Abdullah Boushahri plays Adam, a man who ends up engaged to two women at once, opposite Laila Abdallah and Lulwa Almulla. It entered the global non-English chart at number eight with 1.5 million views in its first week.

In July 2026 came Love in Slow Motion, again directed by Elie El Semaan, written by Eiad Saleh and produced by Eagle Films, with Nour Al-Ghandour back at the head of the cast. Its premise: when Haya’s best friend Jawad gets engaged, her comfortably single life comes apart. It reached number seven in its first week, with 1.7 million views, and number eight in its second, with 2 million.

Neither follow-up came close to the first film’s opening. Two and a half years on, Honeymoonish is still the benchmark for what an Arabic-language comedy made in the Gulf can do on a global platform, and the reference point against which the next titles from the same team are measured.

Where it sits

Honeymoonish does not hide what it is: a light comedy that borrows a format the whole world knows and moves it to a Kuwaiti family, a Lebanese hotel and a question of family law that only makes sense in that culture. Its importance lies less in any single element than in what it proved commercially: that a Gulf romantic comedy, shot in Arabic with regional stars, could find an audience from Lebanon to Mexico in a single week. It is available on Netflix.

Tags: Netflix, comedies, romance