After the Hunt lost roughly US$60 million in cinemas, then went to number one on Prime Video

After the Hunt arrived at the BFI London Film Festival in October 2025 as a prestige gala with three stars and a director in demand. It left cinemas as one of the year's larger financial failures, then became, briefly, the most watched film on Amazon's streaming service.

Guadagnino's film, written by Nora Garrett, stars Julia Roberts as Alma Imhoff, a professor whose star student, played by Ayo Edebiri, accuses a colleague, played by Andrew Garfield, of sexual assault. Michael Stuhlbarg and Chloe Sevigny also appear.

It premiered out of competition at the 82nd Venice International Film Festival on 29 August 2025 and screened in the Gala strand at the 69th BFI London Film Festival, which ran from 8 to 19 October 2025 under festival director Kristy Matheson and programmed 247 films from 79 countries. Just Jared photographed Roberts, Garfield, Edebiri, Stuhlbarg, Thaddea Graham and Guadagnino at the London premiere at the Royal Festival Hall on 11 October.

The commercial result was severe. The film was made for a reported US$70 million to US$80 million, with Roberts paid US$20 million of it, and took US$9.5 million in North America. Audiences graded it C minus on CinemaScore. Rotten Tomatoes records 36 per cent positive from 231 critics with an average of 5.4 out of 10, and Metacritic 52 out of 100 from 41 reviews, with reviewers consistently praising Roberts and objecting to the film's handling of its subject.

Then it went to streaming and behaved like a different film. Amazon put it on Prime Video on 20 November 2025. Collider reported that it went straight to number one on the service's chart, and Screen Rant reported that within days it led subscription video rankings in a dozen countries, from Spain and Poland to Argentina, Egypt and Thailand, citing FlixPatrol.

That gap, between a film almost nobody would pay for and a great many people would watch at no extra cost, is the most interesting thing about After the Hunt, and none of it was visible in October 2025.

One element of the original story needs correcting, because it turned on a quotation that was not said.

At Venice in late August 2025, in an interview with the Italian outlet ArtsLife, the journalist Federica Polidoro asked Roberts and Garfield what had been lost in what she called the politically correct era, and how Hollywood might evolve now that the MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements were "done". Variety reported that when Polidoro clarified the question was for Roberts and Garfield only, Edebiri raised her hand and said: "I know that that's not for me and I don't know if it's purposeful that it's not for me but I just am curious." Garfield replied that both movements are "still absolutely alive". Edebiri added that while there was no longer the same daily mainstream coverage, "I don't think it means that the work is done." CBC News also reported the exchange, which circulated widely.

A version of this story published in October 2025 quoted Edebiri as saying "I don't think it's done at all." That line does not appear in any contemporaneous report of the exchange. It is a paraphrase that hardened into a quotation, and it has been removed.

The festival that hosted the London premiere had a better year than the film did. Lucrecia Martel's Our Land won the Best Film award and Chloe Zhao's Hamnet the audience award, with Rian Johnson's Wake Up Dead Man opening the festival and Julia Jackman's 100 Nights of Hero closing it.

What remains unresolved is what the streaming result means for films of this size. After the Hunt cost roughly eight times what it earned in cinemas and then found a global audience the moment the price of entry fell away. That is either an argument for releasing mid budget adult dramas straight to streaming, or an argument that this particular film was always a streaming title sold as a cinema event. Neither Amazon MGM nor Guadagnino has said which conclusion they have drawn, and the answer will show up in what gets a theatrical window next.