A24’s Bourdain Movie Is Still in Theaters — and It’s the Weird, Wonderful One to Catch This Week

LOS ANGELES — FRIDAY, OCTOBER 9, 2026 — Two months into its theatrical run, A24’s Tony is still the most interesting movie you can walk into this weekend. The Anthony Bourdain biopic — which is really a coming-of-age comedy-drama that happens to star a 19-year-old Tony Bourdain — opened in six New York and LA theaters on August 7, rode the best limited opening of 2026 to a nationwide expansion, and it’s still playing: a Vermont arthouse is running it October 9 through 22, it’s on this week’s new-release lists, and South Africa gets it starting today.

Here’s the setup, per A24: it’s the summer of 1975, and a 19-year-old Bourdain — rejected for a writing fellowship, drifting — follows a girl to Provincetown, Massachusetts, takes a job washing dishes in a seafood restaurant, and finds, in the heat and chaos of a professional kitchen, the life he’d spend the rest of his years chasing. Dominic Sessa, the breakout from The Holdovers, plays Tony. Antonio Banderas is the restaurant’s chef and owner, an unlikely mentor. Emilia Jones, Leo Woodall, Dagmara Domiñczyk, Rich Sommer and Stavros Halkias round out the cast, per EatPlayDrink Cape Town and Catamount Arts.

02 Why 19-Year-Old Bourdain Is the Right Lens

The genius of Tony is what it refuses to do. The Bourdain estate, which supported the film, was explicit: this is not a cradle-to-grave summary. In a statement, the estate called it “an interpretation” of one transformative summer — a film honoring Bourdain’s “complexity, his intellectual appetite, and his conviction,” according to The Playlist. Director Matt Johnson, the Canadian filmmaker behind BlackBerry, co-wrote the screenplay with Sessa himself. The two are both Jersey kids who were sent to private school and didn’t fit in, and Johnson told The Playlist the film became a genuine partnership: “He is in every shot of the movie, and carries the entire story on his hunched shoulders.”

That’s the bet: Bourdain’s public image became so vivid — the bestselling books, the television shows, the passport crowded with stamps — that any attempt to explain all of him would flatten him. Instead, Tony looks at the raw material: the kitchen, the friends, the mistakes, the curiosity. Sessa told The Playlist that Bourdain’s curiosity was the key to the role: “Bourdain never wanted to feel like the smartest guy in the room. He had an unwavering desire to learn as much as he could from the world and the people around him.”

03 The Little Movie That Could

The numbers tell their own underdog story. Tony debuted August 7 in just six theaters across New York and LA and pulled $348,955 — a $58,159 per-screen average, the best limited opening of 2026 — which locked in a Certified Fresh score in the mid-90s before most of the country had even seen it, per The Harperverse’s breakdown. It then scaled to 1,642 screens on August 21, adding roughly $5 million in its wide-expansion weekend alone.

Against a production budget somewhere between $8–10 million and a marketing spend of $4–6 million, it’s now sitting at $15.3 million domestic and $19.1 million worldwide, per IndieWire and The Numbers via The Harperverse. Not blockbuster numbers — but on that spend, a genuinely lucrative outcome, and one that only works because the platform release was married to the Bourdain estate’s public blessing.

04 What the Reviews Actually Say

The critical reception has been warm, with interesting dissent. The film holds a Certified Fresh Rotten Tomatoes score in the mid-90s (93% in EatPlayDrink’s October survey; 95% at its limited opening, per The Harperverse), was named a New York Times Critic’s Pick, and the Wall Street Journal said it was “the most exhilarating experience I’ve had at the movies this year,” as EatPlayDrink reported.

Not everyone is converted. The Georgetown Voice, in an October 4 review, praised Sessa’s performance — “arrogant, insecure, and, most importantly, unfinished,” with exactly the lankiness the role needs — but argued the film fictionalizes too freely (there was no Sal, not one pivotal restaurant, and Bourdain didn’t land in Provincetown the way the movie says) and ultimately “forgets the ‘bio’ factor of the biopic.” That’s a fair fight to have — and it’s the kind of argument that only exists because the movie is good enough to argue about. For more film coverage, our culture desk is on it.

05 The Legacy Question

Bourdain died in 2018, and the culture has spent eight years deciding what he means — the honesty, the appetite, the refusal to be a tourist in anyone’s life. Tony’s answer is to go back before any of that existed, to a 19-year-old washing dishes in Provincetown who doesn’t know he’s going to become anybody. If you want the myth, the documentaries have you covered. If you want the moment the myth started forming — the summer, the kitchen, the mistakes — that’s what this one’s for, and it’s still on a big screen. Check what’s next at the movies, or catch up on the rest of today’s headlines.