Honeyjoon Returns to Cinemas in Early 2027 as Launch Film for Attend
Honeyjoon is heading back to cinemas in early 2027, and it will be the first film on Attend, a new platform for booking independent films into theatres.
The announcement came at the American Film Market, a trade fair where film rights and distribution deals are bought and sold. Attend is run by the Fithian Group, which set out to connect film-makers directly with cinema owners. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the platform does not need the film-maker to work with a traditional distributor, the company that usually books a film into cinemas and handles its release.
Attend also uses artificial intelligence to suggest where a film might perform best. The film-maker uploads data about the project, and the system points to the venues and places most likely to draw an audience. The Hollywood Reporter says the technology was one of the topics in a panel at the market that included Honeyjoon's director, Lilian T. Mehrel.
The Fithian Group was founded by John Fithian, who previously led the National Association of Theatre Owners, the main trade body for cinema owners in the United States. He started the company with two longtime colleagues from that association, Patrick Corcoran and Jackie Brenneman.
Honeyjoon was directed by Lilian T. Mehrel and stars Ayden Mayeri and Amira Casar. The story follows a Kurdish-Persian mother and her American daughter, who travel to the Azores, a group of islands in the Atlantic that belong to Portugal, after a major loss in their lives.
The film has already had a long road to audiences. It premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York in 2025, where it won the $1 million AT&T Untold Stories Award. It went on to play around 50 festivals and took more than 25 audience and jury awards. In summer 2026, it had a limited theatrical release through Circle Collective, the arthouse label of the distributor Utopia. Arthouse films are usually aimed at smaller, specialist audiences rather than big multiplex crowds.
The new return to cinemas will be the film's first run through Attend. For cinema owners, the platform offers a way to find films without going through a larger distributor. For Honeyjoon, it is a second chance to reach audiences in theatres, arriving in the first months of 2027.
Attend is new, so its first film will show how the system works in practice. Honeyjoon's release will be the first test of whether a film can find its own path to screens this way.
