The majority of Jafar Panahis movies have done illegally, under the radar and in secret away from the eyes of the Iranian government, if not outright banned in its homeland. They’re not exactly meant to be the ticket office smashes. But the international audience that Panahi has managed to cultivate over the years has been respectable, consistently showing up both in the US and abroad, even as Panahi’s films have become more meta and experimental due to the circumstances of how he’s been forced to make them,
His latest filmhowever, the Palme d’Or winner”It was just an accident,” is Panahi’s most narrative feature and most commercial feature in years. And after an impressive opening weekend in just three theaters, the US distributor Neon has hopes for it that would eclipse anything Panahi has released in his career.
“It Was Just an Accident” earned $68,021 from just three screens in its opening weekend for a $22,674 per screen average. The film actually opened on Wednesday, October 15th, so its domestic haul over the 5-day weekend is $115,000, giving it a per-screen average of roughly $30,000. Neon made the funkier Wednesday opening to accommodate a handful of Q&As with Panahi himself in both New York and Los Angeles.
If you use that metric — and Neon will surely want to — it barely edged out the cross-platform release of Sony Pictures Classic’s “I’m Still Here,” which had been the biggest international opener of 2025 so far. That film grossed $6.2 million domestically and totaled $36.1 million worldwide. And that’s the ballpark “It Was Just an Accident” has the potential to crack. It would almost certainly beat any of Panahi’s previous films, the biggest being 2015’s “Taxi” with $3.9 million worldwide.
As for Iranian films, in 2016, Asghar Farhadi’s “The Salesman” had a PSA opening of $23,692 and finished with $2.4 million domestically, and Farhadi’s “A Separation” did the same with a PSA of about $19,000, ending with $7 million for an Oscar as it cycled its way. The hype surrounding this film has led Neon to instead compare “It Was Just an Accident” to its other recent Palme d’Or winners that have successfully crossed over to their international audiences, such as “Triangle of Sadness” ($4.6 million domestic) and “Anatomy of a Fall” ($5 million domestic), both of which opened higher on more screens and did particularly well internationally.
When I played this past weekend at Lincoln Center and Film Forum in New York and AMC Century City in Los Angeles, it wasn’t just the Panahi Q&A that went well. This weekend’s screenings had a steady flow of visitors, attracting young and old and even some Iranian crowds in Los Angeles, which all bodes well as it continues a slow rollout into awards season. That’s important, because Neon has opened every one of theirs now six consecutive Palme d’Or winners in the same time frame in mid-October, which really gives “It Was Just an Accident” a long run to open wider and do the bulk of its business in January after the film has racked up some major awards nominations.
The problem is, especially with platform releases, it’s getting harder and harder to predict the marketplace in the long term. There were two other platform releases this weekend that “It Was Just an Accident” beat, including Kelly Reichardt’s “The Mastermind” from MUBI and Richard Linklater’s “Blue Moon” from Sony Pictures Classics. The feeling among sources is that to really pulling off a platform release these daysa movie must either be a unique event (Panahi advancing to state for the first time in years helps) and must have phenomenal, universal praise (it has a 97 percent on Rotten Tomatoes), not to mention some extra pedigree like a Palme d’Or to survive. Anything that’s just average won’t stick.
But “It Was Just an Accident” feels like a politically relevant story, one that combines some suspense, tension and revenge with some humor. The film follows a recently released man who recognizes his torturer from when he was imprisoned, leading him to impulsively kidnap the torturer with the intention of killing him. But doubts that he might be making a mistake lead him to track down some of the torturer’s other alleged victims to determine how he should really act and serve justice.
The film works on its own, but Panahi’s own story in prison at the hands of his government has huge parallels to the film’s plot that make the film itself all the more resonant. That’s the kind of story that Neon has played well and exactly why audiences will continue to show up at theaters in the long run.
