'The Invite,' 'Sentimental' and the Phenomenon of Remakes
Updated: 32 minutes ago
This case study was conducted as part of a Fulbright research grant in 2026-27 supported by the Universidad Complutense de Madrid and Central Washington University.
Olivia Wilde’s The Invite, which launched an all-night bidding war at Sundance and made its European premiere in August to a sold-out outdoor audience of thousands at Locarno, premieres Oct. 16 in Spain. That wouldn’t normally be news, but The Invite is a remake of a Spanish film, Sentimental (The People Upstairs), from Barcelona-based writer-director Cesc Gay, and it co-stars Madrid-born Penélope Cruz.
US audiences might be surprised to find out that The Invite is a remake—and not the first of this Spanish title. Five previous adaptations have already been made in France, Italy, Switzerland and South Korea, and five more are currently underway in Portugal, Holland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Each remake adapts the language, characters and themes to its own culture, while the US remake does that and additionally aims to make a film for international audiences (more on this below).
Wilde co-stars in her remake as Angela, whose marriage to Joe (Seth Rogan) is on the rocks. When they invite their enigmatic upstairs neighbors, Pina (Cruz) and Hawk (Edward Norton), over for dinner, their plans for their marriage and their expectations for the future are thrown into chaos. The Invite has been in the works for years. An earlier package set to star Amy Adams, Paul Rudd and Tessa Thompson got shut down because of the Hollywood strikes.
The original in Spain starred a locally well-known cast led by Javier Cámara and Argentinean actress Griselda Siciliani as the struggling couple (Julio and Ana), across Antonio San Juan and Belén Cuesta as the neighbors (Salva and Laura). The film premiered at the San Sebastian International Film Festival in 2020 and was nominated for five top Oscar-equivalent Goya Awards, winning Best Supporting Actor for San Juan.
This case study will consider the logic behind remakes, their value and contribution, how the remake market works, what scholars say about the phenomenon of remakes, and how The Invite differs from other iterations by adapting the Spanish original for an international, rather than another local, audience.
Why Remake? And how?
Together with Perfect Strangers, the Italian film that holds the record as the most adapted film of all time, with at least 20 international versions, Sentimental is fast becoming one of the biggest intellectual properties (IP) in Europe.
Sentimental allows for potentially inexpensive and widely appealing adaptations because of its parameters: a dialogue-heavy chamber dramedy starring just four people in one setting and dealing with universal themes of love, marriage, sex and relationships. Gay’s original film came out just before COVID, and it contains themes of social isolation (the insular yet unhappy married couple) that global audiences could relate to well after the pandemic shutdowns ended.
“I think the fact that it was so simple, so funny, so witty, so intelligent and so easy to replicate has helped a lot with our remake deals,” says Iván Díaz, who negotiated rights for the film as head of international sales at Barcelona-based Filmax. While most companies option rights exclusively for their territory, or in specific cases for additional territories that share language or culture, American remake rights are the only ones not limited by territory, Díaz explains, because American films expect to be distributed worldwide. "It is very difficult or unrealistic that a remake is going to be produced in America if they can only have domestic distribution."
Díaz notes that, in general, the remake business is helping compensate for lowered prices for distribution rights in many international territories. In the case of Sentimental, the film was also released during the pandemic and, as a result, did less business than most Gay films, so the remake rights helped compensate for that as well. And, he adds, "The reality is that since The Invite has been a great hit, we're making more deals. It’s helping us." Filmax also has a small participation in the success of The Invite.
Despite appearances, American remakes aren't always the biggest money-makers. Díaz notes that Filmax has seen projects make more money in France or Italy. That's especially true for remakes of TV series, which will make more money on multiple seasons than just one. Companies only acquire remake rights if they see potential. "Because our business is a risky business nowadays, people tend to replicate only things that have worked. You have to prove that you really had a success in your local market. People are not willing to take risks."
He explains the usual process: a company options rights to the script for "a small figure, so that it's not too big a risk for the client." Options typically last 12 to 18 months while the company works on financing their remake. "When they trigger the option, when they finance the project, we normally try to have a percentage of the budget as the price. The standard in the market, though it changes, can be from 3% to 5%." That depends, he notes, on the negotiation power of each party and the territory, and "you can always add things such as a bonus based on box office performance."
When you sell a film for distribution, you tend to go with the best in the business and clients you've worked with before, Díaz says. "A remake client is different. It’s someone who understands the project. It's someone that is in love with the project... You want someone big enough in the marketplace... but also that this project is a priority for them."
What Does the Research Say?
Matching the experience and example of Sentimental, scholarship on remakes has turned in recent years towards considerations of the process of adaptation rather than direct appropriation, looking at each text within its own cultural, linguistic, political, economic and industrial contexts. Studies consider how transnational and culturally embedded adaptations reassert localized identities, employing terms like "transnational remake," "cross-cultural remake," "international remake," or “tradaptation,” a term put forward in the upcoming 2027 book Remaking Perfect Strangers.
This reflects a move away from traditional textual, aesthetic or critical comparisons framing Hollywood remakes as a one-way exploitative copying of a film, and towards a model "based around 'intertextuality and hybridity'" (see, for example, Smith & Verevis’s Transnational Film Remakes, or Daniel Herbert’s Film Remakes and Franchises). The rights to rework the scripts are sold across borders, yet the films themselves appear to audiences as entirely local. The process of adaptation and reinterpretation itself ensures this.
Transnational Film Remakes
Iain Robert Smith and Constantine Verevis (2017)
Some authors have also distinguished between localized remakes and reinterpretations of pre-existing IP without a need to acquire rights. These are films that take inspiration from ideas, genre conventions and even production strategies of successful local films in other countries (what Jara Fernández Meneses and Vicente Rodríguez Ortega refer to as “mirror films”). This can lead to disputes when mirror films (or series) are too close to the original but haven’t paid for those rights.
Comedies are very common for both remakes and mirror films since they demand localization; humor may have universal qualities, but what is considered funny and how humor is delivered can depend heavily on cultural context. Something similar can be said about horror films and thrillers as well, Díaz notes, citing Quarantine, the US remake of REC, although he points out that REC performed better on the international market than its remake. Still, it’s local comedies that tend to perform the best in home territories around the world and potentially inspire copies.
It is my contention that Hollywood remakes are unique from other remakes, which are generally adapted, reinterpreted and localized for a single market or region, because not only is the English language and American culture recognized and well-received globally, thanks to the traditional flow of entertainment products, but Hollywood remakes further universalize films for an international audience by capitalizing on global stars and weeding out local nuances in settings, dialogues and references, even too-American ones.
In other words, US remakes take advantage of the international distribution capacity and reach of the Hollywood system, to be made on a much bigger budget and targeting a global, not a local, audience. The Invite, for example, had a reported budget of around $15m, sold distribution rights at Sundance for around $10m. It has earned over $59m so far at the international box office ($26m domestically in North America and the rest abroad). The numbers for Gay’s original are infinitely more modest: it earned less than $900,000 at the Spanish box office and just under $275,000 internationally. Its budget is unreported, but average Spanish film budgets are still under $4m.
And, by point of comparison, the upcoming Baltic versions employed a shared production model previously used for the regional adaptations of Perfect Strangers. The local producers developed three local-language versions of the film with separate directors, casts and creative teams but shared sets and select key crew members in order to bring costs down.
Here are a few articles I've written over the years on the topic of remakes:
Comparing The Invite and Sentimental
"It is interesting to compare one movie to the other," Díaz says of the many remakes of Sentimental, "because it says a lot about how we deal with relationships in different countries." Employing Hollywood storytelling and production conventions, The Invite can be seen to adapt Sentimental in ways that pull from American culture and values but additionally speak to a global rather than just another local audience.
As Díaz matter-of-factly puts it, “Audiences worldwide are used to American storytelling.” Here are a few notable ways this globalization can be seen in comparing the Hollywood remake to the Spanish original.
Cast & Setting – seeking global familiarity. The Hollywood film casts stars who are familiar to international audiences. It mostly follows the original in structure and setting, and the apartments even look alike, but it moves the action from an unnamed Spanish city to a globally recognizable American one (San Francisco, shown in opening scenes of Rogan biking home from work). The music is also more globally recognizable in the remake (with songs by Sade and Joni Mitchell, for example).
Look & Tone – entertaining distractible audiences. Wilde and her DP, Adam Newport-Berra, add a greater sense of kinetic movement within the single set by using more dynamic camera positioning and faster edits. This makes the lack of action potentially more palatable for easily distracted audiences than the Spanish original, which is more traditionally focused on the characters and their dialogues.
That’s logical for a work adapted from the theater (Gay's original script was written for the theater), but it also admittedly fits with traditional conceptions of American global entertainment versus European art cinema. What doesn’t quite fit those outlines are the endings—the Hollywood version’s final scene is more open-ended and left to interpretation than the Spanish original.
Characters & Humor – exaggerating for maximum effect. The US film takes character traits and exaggerates them so viewers can easily classify and understand their archetypes in broad strokes: Joe has low self-esteem, Angela has anxiety, Pina is sexually enlightened, Hawk is a man in control. Obvious clues are offered in wardrobes as well as behaviors, like Angela sweating, shaking and popping a Xanax.
The script for The Invite also strives for more laugh-out-loud moments. While the original is funny, the comedy feels more local—particularly Cámara’s Julio, whose sarcasm could land as more surly than amusing in a different cultural context. Rogan is more of an everyman—he can’t believe his good fortune that Pina wants to have sex with him, whereas Julio never seems game to participate.
Themes & Culture – the American Dream belongs to everyone. In the US version, the characters have been Americanized to have different values, such as new class aspirations. Angela doesn’t just order a new carpet or put out a few snacks for dinner (like Ana), she buys a very expensive rug from a recognizable (to Hawk) artisan and an upscale assortment of deli meats and cheeses. Joe’s embarrassment that they live in an inherited apartment is a contrast to the original, where the detail that the apartment belonged to Julio’s grandparents is given with no fanfare, totally appropriate within the Spanish cultural context.
The Invite proves once again that Hollywood is still the only consistently global film producer and distributor. None of the other remakes of Sentimental, nor the original itself, had the rights, infrastructure or audience to premiere widely and successfully outside its home territory.
Images courtesy of Filmax and A24.
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