‘The Invite’ Becomes New Surprise Summer Box Office Hit
Olivia Wilde has a bona fide hit on her hands, and it arrived in one of the least likely packages of the season, a smart, grown-up dinner-party comedy. The Invite, the A24 ensemble film Wilde both directs and stars in, is closing in on $40 million worldwide, a genuinely rare feat for an adult comedy in a summer ruled by blockbusters.
After roughly $20 million at the domestic box office and a healthy international rollout across more than three dozen markets, the film has become one of the season’s true word-of-mouth success stories, according to Variety.
How The Invite Became a Box Office Surprise
The film’s rise has been a slow, steady build rather than an overnight explosion, which is exactly what makes it so remarkable. It opened on June 26 on just seven screens, posting one of the strongest per-screen averages of the entire year, before expanding to more than 1,600 theaters and holding its own against titans like The Odyssey and Spider-Man: Brand New Day. As Deadline reported, the comedy landed Certified Fresh with critics and drew glowing audience scores, and a striking ninety percent of opening-weekend moviegoers recommended seeing it on the big screen rather than waiting for home release.
Inside Olivia Wilde’s Six-Year Journey
Getting the film to theaters at all was its own quiet act of perseverance, since Olivia Wilde spent roughly six years shepherding the project through a gauntlet of setbacks. Along the way she weathered the delays of the 2023 industry strikes, the devastation of the 2024 Los Angeles wildfires, and even a complete turnover of her cast, all before the film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and ignited a bidding war that ended with A24 paying a reported twelve million dollars for domestic rights. Crucially, Wilde pushed hard for a traditional theatrical release when a streaming deal would have been the safer bet, and the payoff has only strengthened her reputation heading into her next film, the Christmas comedy Naughty.
Why Audiences Are Loving the Dinner-Party Comedy
At the heart of the film is a premise as sharp as it is squirm-inducing, with Wilde and Seth Rogen playing a married couple on shaky ground who host their magnetic upstairs neighbors, portrayed by Penélope Cruz and Edward Norton, for a dinner party that slowly unravels into buried resentments and unexpected propositions. Written by Rashida Jones and Will McCormack and adapted from the Spanish film The People Upstairs, it plays like a modern chamber comedy built on uncomfortable truths and very good performances. In a summer of giants, Olivia Wilde bet on a small, sharp, grown-up comedy and the simple pleasure of a night at the movies, and audiences have rewarded that gamble beautifully.
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