A24 is building its summer marketing campaign in earnest, dropping the first official poster for “The Invite” today and confirming that the film’s debut trailer will arrive tomorrow, April 7. The announcement marks the studio’s first major promotional push for one of its most anticipated releases of the year, a film that had the independent film world buzzing long before it ever had a distributor.
“The Invite” is directed by Olivia Wilde and written by Rashida Jones and Will McCormack. The ensemble comedy stars Wilde alongside Seth Rogen, Penélope Cruz, and Edward Norton in what critics who caught its Sundance premiere described as a sharp, deeply funny dinner-party drama. The film follows Joe and Angela, a married couple on the verge of collapse, who invite their upstairs neighbors over for an evening that quickly spirals into unexpected and revealing territory. The neighbors, played by Cruz and Norton, turn out to have a rather unconventional approach to love and commitment, one that forces Joe and Angela to reckon with their own relationship in ways they never anticipated.
The film is an English-language remake of the 2020 Spanish comedy “The People Upstairs,” written and directed by Cesc Gay. Rashida Jones and Will McCormack adapted the screenplay, and Wilde reunited for the project with producer Megan Ellison and Annapurna Pictures, the company behind her widely praised 2019 directorial debut “Booksmart.” “The Invite” represents Wilde’s third feature as a director, following “Booksmart” and her 2022 Venice selection “Don’t Worry Darling.”
The road to today’s poster drop was anything but quiet. After “The Invite” world-premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on January 24 to a standing ovation at the Eccles Theater, it immediately ignited one of the most competitive acquisition battles the festival had seen in years. A24 ultimately prevailed in a three-day bidding war that saw offers climb well past ten million dollars, with Focus Features and a late-entry bid from a newly launched Warner Bros. specialty division pushing the competition to the wire. The final deal reportedly came in north of twelve million dollars for domestic rights alone, a figure that underscored just how much appetite there was for the film among distributors.
A24 has set “The Invite” for a limited theatrical release on June 26, placing it squarely in summer blockbuster territory. The studio’s confidence in the material was evident from the start. Word out of Park City was that A24 intends to position the film for awards consideration, with particular emphasis on the screenplay, though insiders have suggested that the studio’s ambitions for the film may not stop there depending on how the broader awards field develops later in the year.
Critical response from Sundance was exceptionally strong. Variety’s chief film critic Owen Gleiberman called it a “bravura dinner-party dramedy” and praised it as “so original, so brimming with surprise” that audiences watch it in a state of near-total immersion. Writing for IndieWire, Kate Erbland awarded the film a B+ and described it as a genuinely adult comedy with plenty to say. The Hollywood Reporter declared the film “well worth RSVPing,” and Glenn Garner of Deadline wrote that it explores “dynamics of sex and relationships with raw and endearing honesty.” The film currently holds a 92 percent approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes from its early critical notices.
With the first poster now public and the trailer arriving tomorrow, the conversation around “The Invite” is about to go from festival-circuit buzz to full mainstream awareness. For a film that cost A24 more than twelve million dollars to acquire before a single frame of marketing existed, the studio will be counting on that trailer to do considerable work. If Sundance was any indication of the film’s appeal, audiences in June may well be eager to RSVP.
