The evolution of the optical beam with initial phase-front curvature is studied in the strongly nonlocal nonlinear media with exponential-decay response.The analytical solutions are obtained by employing the variational approach.It is found that no matter how high the input power is,the beam is initially expanded for the positive phase-front curvature,and initially contracted for the negative phase-front curvature.For a fixed input power,the curves of the beam width with different initial phase-front curvatures intersect periodically,and interestingly,at these very cross points the optical beams with zero phase-front curvatures happen to either expand to its maximum or contract to its minimum,which do not exist in the Snyder-Mitchell linear model through the comparison between our model with Snyder′s strong nonlocal solitions model.