Olivia Wilde’s ‘The Invite’ Bet Is Paying Off After Don’t Worry Darling

Olivia Wilde stood behind the curtain at the Eccles Center in Park City five months ago, waiting for the credits to roll on her third feature film, The Invite. Her inner monologue ran hot: “They all hated it,” she told The Cut in May. By the time the lights came up, the Sundance audience was on its feet, and A24 was about to write a check for more than $12 million for distribution rights.

That standing ovation, and the bidding war that followed, has carried Wilde into a summer of vindications. The Invite opened in limited release on June 26 and earned the top per-screen average of any indie film in 2026. It sits at 95% on Rotten Tomatoes, and next Friday, July 31, she returns to theaters, this time in front of the camera, as Gregg Araki’s I Want Your Sex arrives via Magnolia Pictures. The bet she placed on process over outcome is paying off, four years after the gossip cycle tried to write her out of the business.

Sundance Stood Up

The Invite premiered at the Eccles Theater on January 24 as part of the 2026 Sundance Film Festival. By the time the lights came up, Wilde was whispering to herself not to cry. “I white-knuckled my way through that screening,” she told The Invite’s sharpest Sundance reviews summary‘s source coverage of her June profile. Row by row, the audience rose. People were getting up quickly, she’d thought. Even more humiliating, she was supposed to walk onstage for a Q&A with her cast. But nobody was walking out.

Within 72 hours, the bidding was on. A24, Warner Bros., Netflix, Apple, Focus, Sony Pictures, Searchlight, Neon, and Black Bear all circled the project. The dance floor narrowed to A24 and Focus, with offers crossing $12 million. A24 won, and Wilde kept the one thing she had made the project conditional on: a theatrical release. “Every distributor wanted to take this movie to theaters, and I was adamant that we didn’t go to a streamer,” she said in the interview framing her 38% Rotten Tomatoes score as liberation. “From all the non-streamers, they all wanted to put it in a theater.”

The Invite opened in New York and Los Angeles on June 26 and expands nationwide on July 10. By the numbers:

• 95% on Rotten Tomatoes from 151 critics, average 8.1/10
• 82 Metacritic score from 45 critics, “universal acclaim”
• $379,000 opening weekend on 7 screens in New York and Los Angeles
• $1,376,068 worldwide gross as of July 6, 2026

The Apartment She Built in 21 Days

The Invite unfolds almost entirely inside a single Bay Area apartment, locked on two couples who arrive for dinner and never quite make it to the main course. Wilde directed and starred, and she made three structural bets on the production. The shoot ran 21 days, in chronological order, on film. Her cast, Seth Rogen, Penélope Cruz, Edward Norton, and Wilde herself, worked for no pay for six weeks of rehearsal before cameras rolled, treating the film more like a stage play than a movie shoot. “It was amazing how much of what you see in films is the first pancake. People go for it, and I have mad respect for those who nail that. But I’ve always wondered what it would be like if we built in time to marinate this thing,” she told Variety. Mike Nichols’ Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, she said, was the north star.

Production designer Jade Healy built the apartment over a single weekend, using the architecture as a fifth character. Healy designed “frames within frames,” mirrors, and a tight airshaft that lets one character spy on another through a Rear Window sightline. Costume designer Arianne Phillips dyed Wilde’s blouse to match the walls so Angela, the failed musician’s wife who gave up her own ambitions for a home, would almost vanish into the surfaces she had organized her life around.

The 38% That Set Her Free

In 2022, Wilde’s Don’t Worry Darling opened to a 38% Rotten Tomatoes score and a tabloid hurricane. She has now reframed both.

I believe in early failure. If you go through that, the way Don’t Worry Darling did with a 38% on Rotten Tomatoes, there’s liberation.

Olivia Wilde, in conversation with Variety. The film’s critical and commercial stumble taught her, she said, “how fickle it all is.” She went on to make The Invite with the explicit feeling that there was nothing left to prove to anyone. “If I’m like, I’ll show you, I’m still trying to achieve success in your eyes, not mine,” she told Variety. “I’m not Michael Jordan, going back on the court to break every record.”

After Don’t Worry Darling, she told The Cut, “I don’t think you know what you’re made of until you fall apart. I don’t trust anyone who hasn’t had their heart broken. If you can push through the moment you have previously identified as the worst possible thing that could happen to you, whether that is divorce or the internet hating you or whatever, you are forged into something way better than you could have possibly imagined.”

She spent years rebuilding. She drove to Big Sur, climbed mountains in Bhutan, took trips to Ireland, and explored upcountry towns in Maui, often alone. She read Eve Babitz and Carrie Fisher. She started journaling. Therapy was part of it. “I tell my female friends to take themselves on road trips. You meet strangers. You introduce yourself as who you are,” she told her June 2026 profile interview about The Invite and Don’t Worry Darling. She said she returned to a baseline by spending time with people who did not recognize her at all.

Back in Los Angeles, at a Blue Bottle Coffee in May, a woman approached her table. “I’m a mom to a queer teen, and I want you to know that I so appreciate Booksmart,” the woman said, telling Wilde her 13-year-old’s movie list had Wilde’s 2019 debut at the top. Wilde placed her hand over her heart. A moment later, she turned back: “When people come up to me like that, it makes all the bullshit of this fucking business worth it, you know?”

The Villain She Was Made Into

Don’t Worry Darling was released in September 2022. Within weeks, gossip sites were running stories about a screaming match between Wilde and Florence Pugh, who starred in the film. The rumors cited Wilde’s relationship with Harry Styles, her decade-younger co-star, and reported alleged friction between Wilde and her cast and crew. None of the rumors were corroborated. “I have never had a screaming match on my set. I was never not available on set. I wanted to be like, ‘None of this is true,'” she told The Cut.

I became the full-on villain. Like Cruella.

Olivia Wilde, to The Cut. The studio and others around her wanted her to stay silent. “I was told, ‘Don’t say a f***ing word. Just go out there and smile,'” she recalled. “I resent that, but it taught me it’s not the way I want to handle things.” Jennifer Garner, her co-star in the 2011 film Butter, had warned her years earlier how the public assigns roles. “She said it’s like you get cast in a soap opera by the public. And they assign you an obvious archetype: the damsel in distress, the good girl, the pretty girl,” Wilde told The Cut. “I was initially cast as an object of desire. But in the past few years, I feel my character was rewritten.”

She and Styles dated for around two years, ending in late 2022, and she describes the relationship to The Cut as “loving and wonderful and joyful.” She does not regret the time with him. She does regret the years she spent not saying so. “I hate that I didn’t directly, publicly acknowledge the negative buzz around the film and my personal life,” she said in the same interview.

Rogen’s Reset Button and the Araki Reunion

In 2025, Seth Rogen cast Wilde in an episode of his Apple TV+ satire The Studio, in a heightened, self-mocking version of herself. The casting was a deliberate release valve. “Olivia was coming off this somewhat public debacle, so it seemed like an opportunity for her to make fun of herself,” Rogen told The Cut, referencing her appearance in Sundance 2026’s final Park City lineup including Wilde‘s broader 2026 run, a year that included her the A24 podcast conversation she did with Seth Rogen. The role was followed, in 2026, by The Invite, where Wilde and Rogen play a contemptuous married couple hosting their upstairs neighbors, Cruz and Norton, for a dinner that devolves into questions about whether to stay together at all. Wilde did not cast herself initially. “No way. I never would have suggested myself for this role ever. Probably because I would have been too intimidated to work with these people who are some of my favorite actors,” she told Silver Screen Riot. “It was really because they asked me to. They, being the actors, said we want you to kind of complete this foursome and jump in and do it with us.” That opening the specialty box office report on the limited opening described as the highest per-screen average of any 2026 indie opening.

I Want Your Sex, written by Karley Sciortino and Araki, was shot in Los Angeles beginning October 2, 2024. Wilde plays Erika Tracy, a renowned, provocative artist who hires Hoffman’s naive assistant to become her sexual muse. The film is rated R for strong sexual content, graphic nudity, and pervasive language. Rotten Tomatoes has it at 88% from 42 critics, and it opens July 31 via Magnolia Pictures. The I Want Your Sex cast and production timeline lists Cooper Hoffman, Charli XCX, Mason Gooding, Chase Sui Wonders, Daveed Diggs, Johnny Knoxville, and Margaret Cho alongside Wilde.

Wilde’s slate this summer, then, is unusually heavy, and almost entirely comic:

• The Invite (A24, in theaters since June 26, nationwide July 10): directed and starred
• I Want Your Sex (Magnolia, July 31): starring role as Erika Tracy
• The Studio (Apple TV+, Season 2 in production): guest role as herself

Wilde told Yahoo of the Araki role: “It’s so camp, and it was an opportunity to laugh at not only different sides of my personality but at archetypes of women.” Araki, in the same conversation, set the terms. “This is a role for somebody who doesn’t give a f***. We have to be completely fearless and not worry that she’s unsympathetic.” Wilde’s reply: “That’s exactly what I want to do right now.”

What’s Next: Heartbreaking and Hilarious

For the first time since Don’t Worry Darling, Wilde has a public slate she controls. In The Cut’s June profile, she said she will start directing another feature film “soon,” one she describes as both heartbreaking and hilarious. She declined to name the project. In her Variety interview, she pointed to the same horizon: “The risk is the thing. It is the reward.” The 95% Rotten Tomatoes score, the top per-screen average of any 2026 limited opening, and the $12 million-plus A24 deal have given her, she told Variety, “a level of un-self-consciousness that only comes from recognizing that the only way to achieve anything worthwhile is to throw yourself into it completely.”

The Invite is dedicated to Diane Keaton, who died on October 11, 2025. The Sundance premiere happened a few months later. The summer opens with Wilde as the central creative force behind two films in theaters and a guest turn in a third. It closes, by Wilde’s own framing, with the next chapter already in pre-production. She has stopped talking about Don’t Worry Darling as the film that broke her. She now talks about it as the film that taught her how to fall apart on her own terms.