Olivia Wilde Calls Streaming Deals a 'Bribe' as She Fights for Theatrical Release of 'The Invite'

Olivia Wilde arrived at the 79th Locarno Film Festival with a pointed message about the economics of the streaming era: studios and financiers are being quietly paid off to bypass theaters entirely. Speaking to international press ahead of a sold-out Piazza Grande screening in front of 8,000 people, Wilde described the incentive structure bluntly — streaming platforms offer financiers more money upfront to skip cinemas, and filmmakers who push back are fighting against their own financial ecosystem.

Wilde was careful to note the distinction between who benefits from that streaming premium — it's the financiers, not the directors. She credited her own financier for giving her the rare ability to make the theatrical call herself, and praised A24 and international sales outfit FilmNation for locking in theatrical deals across global markets. Without that alignment up and down the distribution chain, she said, the film would have quietly landed on a platform like so many comedies before it.

That genre point was central to her argument. Wilde pushed back against the industry's habit of treating comedies as streaming fodder, arguing that no genre is more dependent on communal audience energy — the live chemical reaction of a room full of people laughing together. Comedies, she said, have been unfairly pushed into a second tier that shortchanges both the films and their audiences.

The Invite, written by Will McCormack and Rashida Jones, stars Wilde alongside Seth Rogen, Penélope Cruz, and Edward Norton. It centers on a couple whose strained marriage gets stress-tested when their mysterious upstairs neighbors — Piña and Hawk — come to dinner, with the night unraveling in unpredictable directions. Wilde described making the film as personally transformative, saying it dissolved the cynicism she'd built up and left her more romantic about the messy, shame-laden experiment of long-term relationships.

When Wilde stepped onto the Piazza Grande stage for the European premiere, the sold-out crowd prompted a visibly emotional reaction — she called it overwhelming and acknowledged it was likely the only time the film would ever screen at that scale, in that setting. The festival had to send early-afternoon warnings to ticketholders advising them to arrive well before the 8 p.m. gate opening to manage the crowd flow.