Olivia Wilde was about to make one of the most consequential decisions of her life — selling her brand-new film The Invite to a distributor — and she was in no condition to do it. “I was like, ‘I don’t know if I should be making decisions like this,’” Wilde tells me of the exhausting, two-night bidding war that eventually landed The Invite with A24 following its Sundance Film Festival premiere in January. “Like, I shouldn’t drive, let alone make a huge decision.”
Luckily, she proved more capable than she thought, even on very little sleep. After eschewing streamer money — it was reported Netflix made the higher offer — The Invite became one of the summer’s biggest indie hits, earning nearly $60 million worldwide for the kind of witty, adult-driven dramedy many assumed could succeed only on TV these days. Part of striking the deal with A24, Wilde tells me, was insisting on a proper theatrical release, something afforded to her previous two films as a director, Booksmart and Don’t Worry Darling. But putting The Invite in theaters didn’t just mean having her movie play on screens outside New York and Los Angeles — it also meant having Wilde herself visit many of them and learn a whole lot in the process.
“I not only got to see the film with all these different audiences, but I got to meet the projectionists, and that for me was a very, very cool experience,” the New York-born Wilde tells me on today’s episode of the Prestige Junkie podcast. “The projectionists in Chicago are two awesome women who are the only ones who can project 35mm and 70mm film in Chicago. I was just obsessed with them and their process — I think that was one of the highlights of this entire experience for sure.”
Watching The Invite with several different audiences inevitably means hearing a lot about their lives. A remake of what was originally a Spanish comedy and has since become a durable story in multiple languages, The Invite stars Wilde and Seth Rogen as Angela and Joe, an average San Francisco couple unhappy together in ways likely fairly recognizable to long-term partners. Still, it’s not until Angela makes an impulsive decision to invite their sexually adventurous upstairs neighbors (played by Edward Norton and Penélope Cruz) over for dinner that the issues between her and Joe come bursting to the surface.
“People were much more emotional than expected,” Wilde, 42, tells me about her post-screening conversations with audiences around the country. “People really wanted to stay afterward and talk.” Many locations played The Invite as a double feature alongside other relationship-focused classics like 1969’s Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, which changed the tenor of those audience conversations, too. “It proves that the movie is this living, breathing thing that does change based on the context,” Wilde continues. “I think audiences started to very quickly own the movie and become ambassadors of it — we had this phenomenon of repeat viewers who were bringing partners to see it.”
Should people be nervous about bringing their significant others to The Invite, given the challenges both couples face in the film? That’s one of many things Wilde and I cover on this week’s podcast.
The episode also includes a conversation between me, Christopher Rosen and our guest Richard Lawson about this year’s star-studded best actor race, which may be shaken up yet again when Digger opens this weekend. Chris, Richard and I each ranked 10 best actor contenders in the order of how likely we think they are to be nominated, and though we all agreed on the names in the top 3, there was a whole lot of variation from there. Tune in to see whom we picked, and don’t worry, we’ll have a best actress version of this conversation coming before you know it!
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