For more than ten years, the sex comedy genre has been all but extinct. Not prohibited. Not precisely forgotten. Like a piece of furniture that no one wanted to move but that everyone secretly knew no longer fit the room, it was simply abandoned. The genre reached its zenith in the late 1990s and early 2000s with a run of movies that portrayed sex as a joke, embarrassment, or spectacle. After that, it progressively lost ground to prestige dramas, superhero franchises, and the kind of serious awards-season material that the industry persuaded itself was what viewers truly desired.
Beginning with the 2019 coming-of-age comedy Booksmart, which depicted teenage female sexuality as something genuine, humorous, and sometimes awkward rather than as a crisis or a performance, Olivia Wilde has spent the last few years subtly arguing that this was incorrect. The movie received positive reviews, gained a sincere fan base, and demonstrated that Wilde was a director with a clear message to convey. Since then, her argument’s coherence has grown more apparent.
Seth Rogen, Penélope Cruz, and Edward Norton are seated at a dinner party table in The Invite, the A24-acquired English adaptation of the Spanish film The People Upstairs. This casting alone reveals the type of film Wilde was creating. A four-way invitation that begins with courteous discourse between married couples and ends somewhere that breaks down the social compact into its constituent parts is the foundation of a routine household setting that gradually devolves into something quite uncomfortable and, presumably, incredibly hilarious.
When applied to adults instead than teenagers, the cringe comic tradition is a different animal than what the genre has often tried. It’s much more difficult to pull off than embarrassing a youngster because it requires the audience to identify with the discomfort.
A different kind of project is Gregg Araki’s I Want Your Sex, which debuted at Sundance in 2026. Rather than being a comedy, it is an erotic thriller that puts Wilde in a dominant, kink-positive role alongside Cooper Hoffman. It directly tackles what she has called the modern-day prudishness of a generation that, while ostensibly having more progressive attitudes toward sex than any previous generation, is actually having less of it and seemingly more anxious about it. The conflict between declared openness and genuine reluctance is a more intriguing area than most Hollywood productions are prepared to delve into.
Her emphasis on realism over polish is what unites her work across various projects. Early in her career, Wilde talked about preferring emotional vulnerability and true awkwardness over the overly sexualized beauty that most Hollywood depictions of the subject fall back on. Her characters’ actions on screen have been influenced by this impulse; they are flawed in ways that seem real, and the humor or drama arises from real human failure rather than staged situations. In theory, that is hardly a radical idea. In reality, it is less common than it ought to be, particularly in the sex comedy category.