Which Spanish movie is The Invite based on? Olivia Wilde's version is already its fifth remake
Watching Seth Rogen and Olivia Wilde get slowly dismantled over dinner by Penélope Cruz and Edward Norton, you might assume The Invite sprang fully formed from some A24 pitch meeting.
It did not. It sprang from Barcelona, and it's been springing for ten years straight.
The original: Sentimental
Wilde's film is a remake of Sentimental — released internationally as The People Upstairs — an 82-minute 2020 Spanish comedy by Cesc Gay, in which a bickering couple invites the upstairs neighbors down for dinner and deeply regrets it. Gay was adapting himself: the film is based on his own hit 2015 stage play Los vecinos de arriba, which by his own telling was inspired by a neighbor's, let's say, extremely audible enthusiasm coming through the ceiling.
The premise turned out to be catnip for every film industry on Earth:
- Italy remade it in 2022 (Vicini di casa)
- Switzerland in 2023
- France in 2024
- South Korea took its turn as well
- And now the US, making Wilde's the fifth remake — Gay himself has cheerfully lost precise count
A24 paid north of €10 million for the American version, which prompted Gay's friends to assume he was suddenly rich. His correction was immaculate:
"The 10 million are for the American producers."
What Wilde brought to the table (besides the burnt soufflé)
The remake — scripted by Rashida Jones and Will McCormack — premiered at Sundance and turned its $15 million budget into a $55 million-plus run, which for a four-people-one-apartment sex comedy is genuinely absurd. Wilde credits the quartet, gushing in a featurette:
"You can't imagine what a gift it is for any director."
Five remakes in, the lesson is holding: put two couples in one room, add wine and repressed desire, and any country on the planet will recognize itself immediately.
Previously we wrote: Who killed Tommy in MobLand? The truth was beaten out of the man who disposed of the body
