The conventional wisdom on A24's summer is Backrooms ($396.6 million globally, per IndieWire) and The Invite ($25.5 million). Both were phenomena built on genre mechanics and algorithmic word-of-mouth. Tony is doing something different and, frankly, more interesting: it's proving that a character-driven biopic with a budget reportedly under $15 million can still expand meaningfully in theatrical release when the reviews and the subject matter align.
The film opened August 7 in six theaters, expanded to 37 venues the following weekend, and then — the important part — kept going. According to IndieWire, it earned $5 million from 1,652 screens in its most recent weekend, landing seventh on the overall box office chart. That's a platform-to-wide expansion that actually worked, which is rarer than it sounds. Most specialty releases that try this move stall somewhere around the 200-screen mark when the core arthouse audience is exhausted and the multiplex crowd hasn't been given a reason to show up. Tony cleared that wall.
The Bourdain Variable Is Real, But It's Not the Whole Story
The easy explanation is affection for Anthony Bourdain — and yes, that's part of it. His death in 2018 left a particular kind of cultural grief that doesn't fully dissipate. But affection for a subject doesn't automatically translate to theatrical attendance. The Death of Robin Hood topped out at $8.7 million and was considered a miss — and Rotten Tomatoes' full A24 rankings make clear that even well-reviewed A24 films with built-in mythology can stall when the structural choices don't support expansion.
What Tony has is a specific, contained story — Bourdain's early years in Provincetown, the period before the fame — which gives Dominic Sessa room to build a character rather than impersonate a legend. That's a structural choice worth crediting. Meanwhile, the [Letterboxd fall festival preview](https://letterboxd.com/journal