The audience’s reluctance to go to the cinema did not save Iranian cinema with ‘Bucharest’ either.
Even Atiabi’s timing didn’t work. According to the trend of the last two years, the box office was supposed to thrive with the release of comedies by Masoud Atiabi, but this didn’t happen with ‘Bucharest’.
While in the past two months, no film that its producers believed had commercial success potential has been released, and social conditions have turned going to the cinema into an obsolete tradition, ‘Bucharest’ was screened with the intention of warming up the box office. This is the result of its first six days of public screening: 30,793 viewers, and sales of 1,026,778,000 tomans.
A weak opening for a comedy featuring actors like Pejman Jamshidi, Hossein Yari, Hadi Kazemi, Amirhossein Arman, and Babak Karimi.
Of course, a weak start is not unprecedented for Atiabi’s films. ‘Dynamite’ also premiered in July 2022 after a long hiatus, and its initial sales weren’t very good, especially since the film’s release coincided with a new wave of COVID-19, and before that, it had been a long time since many people went to the cinema.