A few hundred dollars. That's the margin separating two of the most interesting limited releases of the summer after their second weekends in theaters. According to IndieWire's Rentrak data, Jane Schoenbrun's Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (MUBI) and Matt Johnson's Anthony Bourdain biopic Tony (A24) have each earned $1.268 million in total — a dead heat that, in the context of specialized release, is genuinely strange. These films share almost nothing in terms of form, subject, or sensibility. The fact that they're running neck and neck tells you something worth paying attention to.
Two Films, Two Bets, One Scoreboard
The raw numbers first, because they matter here. Camp Miasma earned $890K from 54 locations in its second weekend, for a per-screen average of $16,495. Tony pulled $741K from just 37 locations, with a PSA of $20,047 — meaning Johnson's film is drawing harder from fewer rooms. Camp Miasma jumped 257 percent from its opening on 5 screens; Tony had the bigger Week 1 and added fewer theaters. Both are still in limited release and expanding.
What's notable isn't just the closeness of the numbers — it's what each number represents. Tony is running a classic platform strategy: fewer screens, higher per-screen averages, building word-of-mouth before a wider push. Camp Miasma is doing something slightly different, expanding faster and leaning on the MUBI brand to pull audiences who might not have found it otherwise. The 257 percent jump from 5 screens to 54 is a real signal — that's not just expansion, that's an audience that was waiting.
What the Scoreboard Doesn't Show
Here's the thing about a photo finish: it flattens context. Tony is a film about Anthony Bourdain, one of the most beloved public figures of the last thirty years, directed by Matt Johnson — a filmmaker with a devoted cult following whose previous film Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie landed in Letterboxd's top 25 highest-rated films of 2026 at the midyear mark, silver medal behind only Project Hail Mary. It has a built-in audience, a recognizable subject, and A24's full distribution muscle behind it. The fact that it's only tied with Camp Miasma is, depending on how you read it, either a sign that Johnson's film is underperforming its potential or that Schoenbrun's is wildly overperforming.
Camp Miasma has no such advantages. It's a horror-adjacent film from a filmmaker whose work is formally unusual and emotionally demanding, distributed by MUBI — a platform with a strong curatorial identity but a smaller theatrical footprint than A24. The title alone is a provocation. The fact that it's matching Tony in per-screen average territory suggests something real is happening: audiences are seeking it out, not stumbling into it.
The Ecosystem Story Hiding in the Margins
The same IndieWire chart notes that Neon's The Wrong Girls opened at just 520 screens with a per-screen average of $834 — a weak number that suggests the film either wasn't ready for that footprint or the marketing didn't connect. Meanwhile, Hadestown has now crossed $20 million domestic on just 91 screens in its fourth weekend, a number that would have been unthinkable for a filmed stage production a few years ago. The specialized box office right now is genuinely bifurcated: films that find their audience are finding it hard, and films that don't are getting punished quickly.
This is the environment Camp Miasma and Tony are navigating. And the fact that both are succeeding — by the modest but real standards of specialized release — suggests that the audience for genuinely ambitious indie work is still there. It's not large. It doesn't forgive weak openings. But it shows up when something earns its attention.
What to Watch Next
Both films are still expanding in limited release, so the next two weekends will be telling. The question for Tony is whether it can hold its per-screen average as it adds locations — the Bourdain audience is wide but not necessarily theatrical. The question for Camp Miasma is whether MUBI can sustain the expansion momentum or whether the film's ceiling is closer than the 257 percent jump suggested.
Separately, Letterboxd's August Unreleased Gems shelf — available digitally August 26 through September 25 — is worth tracking for anyone watching what's coming next. Alex Ullom's It Ends, which premiered through Letterboxd Video Store before being acquired by Neon for US theatrical release, is the proof-of-concept that the platform's curation pipeline can actually move films into distribution. That pipeline now sits alongside the fall festival calendar — Venice opens September 2, TIFF follows September 10 — as one of the more interesting mechanisms for surfacing new work before the acquisition frenzy begins.
For now, though, the most interesting sentence in indie film this week is a box office tie. Two films, two distributors, two completely different formal bets — and a margin of a few hundred dollars. The specialized box office has been called a mood ring before. Right now it's reading: genuinely uncertain, which is the most interesting thing it can say.
