Production notes

The character of Winfried was loosely based on Ade's own father, who wore a pair of fake teeth she gave him as a gag gift to play practical jokes. She was also influenced by the comedian Andy Kaufman's alter ego Tony Clifton. Ade set the film in Bucharest in part because many German companies had begun to do business there at the end of the Communist era, with many foreign consultants sent to "change the system" and help businesses turn a profit. "And I like the new wave of Romanian films right now, too. So it’d be fun to work there."

Toni Erdmann opened on July 14, 2016, in Germany and was watched by 752,000 domestic viewers that year. The movie was widely advertised through all public media channels and became the 40th most watched movie in Germany in 2016.

The film received universal acclaim from critics. It holds a 93% approval rating on review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, based on 234 reviews, with an average rating of 8.3/10. The website's critical consensus reads, "Toni Erdmann pairs carefully constructed, three-dimensional characters in a tenderly funny character study that's both genuinely moving and impressively ambitious." On Metacritic, the film holds a rating of 93 out of 100, based on 36 reviews, indicating "universal acclaim". The film was named the best film of the year by the French magazine Cahiers du cinéma. The British film magazine Sight & Sound also named it the best film of 2016 in its poll of 163 critics worldwide. In a 2016 international critics' poll conducted by BBC, the film along with Requiem for a Dream and the film version of Carlos tied for the 100th greatest motion picture since 2000. It also topped the American magazine Film Comment's Best Films of 2016 poll. The New York Times’s chief film critics, A. O. Scott and Manohla Dargis, included it on their lists. In June 2025, the film ranked 59th on The New York Times's list of "The 100 Best Movies of the 21st Century." In July 2025, it ranked 95th on Rolling Stone's list of "The 100 Best Movies of the 21st Century."

Toni Erdmann received the FIPRESCI Award for Best Film In Competition at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival. In August 2016, the film won the FIPRESCI (International Federation of Film Critics)'s Grand Prix for best film of the year, the first time this accolade has been awarded to a female filmmaker. Later that year, in November 2016, the film was awarded the European Parliament's Lux Prize, annually awarded to facilitate the diffusion of European films in the European Union.