Move aside, Rebel Moon! Netflix's new number one movie is a surprise hit
Ready to try a non-English-language film? Netflix has a suggestion
Netflix has a new number one movie, and it comes not from the US, UK or Europe, but Kuwait.
Honeymoonish is the latest global number one Netflix film according to Flixpatrol, and is the rare example of an Arabic language movie hitting the top spot.
It’s a comedy, the story of a newly-married couple whose wedding is arranged in just a week. And after that, predictably enough, they find they have nothing in common.
You can watch it in the original language if you like, but there’s the dubbed trailer:
The film currently sits at a pretty dismal 4.6/10 on IMDb, but not all the reviews out there are negative.
Ready Steady Cut gave Honeymoonish a solid 3/5 review, saying “it’s the performances that make you root for the success of Noor and Hamad’s unconventional marriage, even when the jokes don’t land.”
Perhaps unsurprising given its Kuwait roots, the film is likely to come across quite socially conservative to viewers in the US and UK.
“It’s a fine line, not shifting to a story that doesn’t look like our society and that doesn’t look like us,” director Elie El-Semaan told Arab News. “You have to maintain the authenticity of the project, but, at the same time, take things up a notch and build on the story to do something that people haven’t seen before.”
Honeymoonish bumped Rebel Moon — Part Two: The Scargiver off the top spot. And, even after a couple of weeks, might be taken as a sign Zack Snyder’s movie doesn’t have all that much staying power.
Its second week on stream, Rebel Moon — Part Two hit a peak of 38.8 million hours viewed. That’s far off what Damsel, a somewhat low-profile movie starring Millie Bobby Brown, achieved earlier this year. It hit 93.2 million hours streamed in its second week.