Olivia Wilde says the invitation to make The Invite came with a hard-earned edge: after Don’t Worry Darling landed a 38% score on Rotten Tomatoes, she felt freer to take a bigger swing. The film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, and Wilde was blunt about where she wanted it to land next: in theaters, not on a streamer.
38% and a third feature
“I believe in early failure,” Wilde said in a Variety interview. “If you go through that, the way ‘Don’t Worry Darling’ did with a 38% on Rotten Tomatoes, there’s liberation.” That is the business logic underneath The Invite, her third feature: a critical setback gave her room to make a film that does not behave like a safe follow-up.
She shot it in 21 days, in story order, on film, inside a single San Francisco apartment. That kind of production plan compresses risk into every day on set, which is why the movie also depended on the cast agreeing to work for nothing for six weeks so the experiment could hold together.
Seth Rogen, Edward Norton, Penelope Cruz
Seth Rogen appears in the film, and Wilde compared his performance to Albert Brooks and 1980s Richard Dreyfuss. Edward Norton and Penelope Cruz also appear, while Jade Healy built the apartment set in a single weekend and Arianne Phillips dyed Wilde’s blouse to match the walls.
Those details matter because the movie’s confinement is the point: the apartment has to feel designed rather than merely rented, and the wardrobe has to live inside the same box. When a film is built around one space, the set, costumes, and shooting order are part of the storytelling, not decoration.
A24 takes The Invite theatrical
“Every distributor wanted to take this movie to theaters, and I was adamant that we didn’t go to a streamer,” Wilde said on a Variety Zoom interview. A24 distributed The Invite, which puts the release in line with her preference for a theatrical run even as streaming has changed the Hollywood business.
That is the real takeaway for viewers and the industry alike: Wilde used the reaction to Don’t Worry Darling as leverage, not baggage, and turned it into a tougher production model for The Invite. The open question now is whether the film’s ending, which she said she is happy to unpack for anyone who caught it, will drive the kind of conversation that keeps a theatrical title moving after opening weekend.
