A24 Has Cracked the Code on the Adult Summer Comedy; and The Invite Is Their Next Test

A24 turned Materialists into a $100M sleeper hit, now The Invite opens Friday. Here’s the playbook and what could break it.

The studio didn’t invent the playbook. They just remembered it while everyone else forgot.

Somewhere in the early 2010s, the major studios quietly made a decision. Mid-budget adult comedies, the kind built around movie stars, sharp writing, and actual human situations, were too expensive to make, too unpredictable to market, and too easily crushed by the next Marvel release. So they stopped making them.

The audience for those movies didn’t go anywhere. They just stopped being served.

A24 noticed.

The Vacuum and the Play

Materialists, Céline Song’s romantic comedy starring Dakota Johnson, Pedro Pascal, and Chris Evans, opened in mid-June 2025 to $12 million domestically, A24’s third-biggest debut ever, before legging out to $101.3 million worldwide on a $20 million budget. It became the highest-grossing independent film of 2025 and A24’s third-highest-grossing film of all time.

That number matters. But what matters more is how it got there.

The “limited launch, expand if buzzy” distribution model is A24’s signature move: build momentum, maximize modest budgets, let the audience do the marketing. It is not a new idea. It’s a very old idea that the studios abandoned when they decided blockbusters were the only game worth playing. A24 picked it up off the floor, dusted it off, and has been running it with increasing precision ever since.

The playbook has three moves:

Festival first. Generate critical credibility and word-of-mouth heat before a dollar of marketing is spent. Materialists premiered at Sundance to strong reviews before its June theatrical release. The Invite did the same; it arrived at Sundance with a standing ovation, a fierce multi-studio bidding war, and the kind of industry excitement that signals something genuinely special.

Limited open, counterprogramming window. Don’t compete with the blockbuster on its own terms. Open small, in the right corridor, against the right competition. A24 dated The Invite for June 26; a pre-July 4th slot that has increasingly become fertile ground for adult-skewing comedies that can thrive on word of mouth.

Let the audience expand it. A24 has built a self-sustaining community of cinephiles through their membership club, social amplification, and merch drops — audiences primed to show up opening weekend and evangelize outward. The studio doesn’t buy awareness. It engineers conversation.

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Why The Invite Is a Strong Candidate

Every element that made Materialists work is present here, and some of them are stronger.

The cast is, if anything, more combustible. Olivia Wilde and Seth Rogen as a marriage on the rocks, Penélope Cruz and Edward Norton as the neighbors who unravel it; four stars operating at their ceiling, by all early accounts. Variety’s chief film critic called it a “bravura dinner-party dramedy” like Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? reimagined as vintage Woody Allen. IndieWire gave it a B+. The Guardian gave it four stars.

The bidding war was real and fierce; A24 beat out Focus Features, Sony, Warner Bros.’ new genre label, Netflix, Neon, Apple, and Black Bear to secure North American rights for $10 million-plus. Studios don’t go eight figures on a dinner party comedy unless multiple smart people think it can travel.

The creative pedigree holds up to scrutiny. The screenplay is by Rashida Jones and Will McCormack, who previously collaborated on Celeste and Jesse Forever. Wilde’s previous film, Booksmart, demonstrated she can direct comedy with real authority. This is her third feature, and the early reception suggests she’s operating at a new level.

And the structural setup is ideal: A24 had a great sleeper hit last summer with Materialists, which grossed close to $108 million worldwide; positioning The Invite as the natural follow-up entry in what’s becoming an annual A24 summer adult comedy slot.

What Could Derail It

The case against is worth taking seriously.

The Invite is a remake. It’s based on Cesc Gay’s 2020 Spanish film The People Upstairs , which means the DNA is borrowed, not original. A24’s best sleeper hits tend to feel like things that couldn’t have existed any other way. A remake, however well-executed, carries a slight whiff of calculation.

Wilde’s track record is also genuinely uneven. Booksmart was a critical triumph that underperformed commercially. Don’t Worry Darling was a commercial curiosity that imploded under the weight of its own press cycle. The Sundance reaction on The Invite is the best signal she’s cracked something new — but it’s still a signal, not a guarantee.

And Materialists had one thing The Invite doesn’t: a love triangle with three of the most-watched stars working right now, at a moment when Pascal and Evans were both at cultural peak. The chemistry of Wilde, Rogen, Cruz, and Norton is intriguing precisely because it’s more volatile and less predictable — which is either the thing that makes it special or the thing that limits its ceiling.

The Test

Here’s what to watch for this weekend.

If The Invite opens to $8 million or more in limited release, A24 will expand quickly and this becomes the summer’s adult comedy story. If it opens soft — say, $3–4 million — the legs question becomes urgent fast, because a film like this needs to build, not coast.

The number that matters most isn’t opening weekend gross. It’s the second-weekend drop. Materialists was showing great staying power weeks into its run, grossing $720K on 589 screens well into July — the signature of a film earning its audience one conversation at a time. That’s the model. That’s what A24 is going for here.

The studio has cracked the code on the adult summer comedy. The question The Invite answers is whether the code works without Céline Song running it — and whether Olivia Wilde is the director to prove it does.