Seven screens. $393,357. A per-screen average of $56,194.
Those are the opening weekend numbers for Olivia Wilde's The Invite, per IndieWire's specialized box office chart, and they're worth sitting with for a moment. Platform releases live and die by their per-screen averages — that's the signal distributors use to decide whether to expand, hold, or quietly let a film exhaust its run. And The Invite's opening puts it in genuinely interesting company.
The Numbers in Context
A24 acquired The Invite from Annapurna in what IndieWire describes as an aggressive bidding war out of Sundance — which means the distributor already signaled confidence before a single ticket was sold. The platform opening validates that bet, at least partially.
For comparison: Pillion opened on four screens and averaged just above $60K per screen, per IndieWire's chart, and never expanded beyond 369 screens — finishing with a solid $3.8 million total. Mother Mary averaged only $33K from five screens and played for five weeks before disappearing. The high watermark in recent A24 platform history is Marty Supreme, which nearly outgrossed The Invite on opening day alone from six screens, pulling $863K for the weekend.
So The Invite sits in the middle tier of A24's recent platform releases — well above Mother Mary, trailing Marty Supreme, roughly comparable to Pillion on a per-screen basis. The question now is whether A24 pushes it wide or lets it breathe in limited release. Given that the studio has been expanding its wide-release appetite — The Invite's own chart entry notes A24 "more frequently" launches its films wide these days — the pressure to scale will be real.
The Longer Story This Chart Is Telling
What makes this week's specialized chart genuinely interesting is what's happening around The Invite, not just at the top.
Maddie's Secret and Rose of Nevada are both still expanding in their second weekends, each adding eight screens. I wrote about Maddie's Secret's unusual release strategy back in late June, and Rose of Nevada got its own treatment the week before that — the short version is that both films are running patient, deliberate platform campaigns that look increasingly vindicated. Two films holding and expanding simultaneously is not nothing; it suggests the specialized market has genuine appetite right now, not just for one title but for several.
Then there's Romeria, Carla Simón's Cannes drama, coming in at sixth on the specialized chart with $15,193 in its opening. That's a modest number, but Simón's Alcarràs took a long time to find its American audience too — the question is whether whoever is distributing Romeria has the patience to let it build. (The chart doesn't specify the distributor, and I won't invent one.)
And then, quietly, there's Blue Heron.
The Film That Won't Stop
Janus Films' Blue Heron crept back into the specialized top ten in its eleventh weekend of release, approaching $600K at the domestic box office. I covered the Criterion Channel streaming announcement when it broke — IndieWire had the exclusive — but the theatrical run continuing into week eleven is its own story. That's not a film coasting on streaming buzz; that's a film with an actual audience showing up to theaters, repeatedly, over nearly three months.
For context: the specialized box office is brutal. Most films that open on one or two screens are gone within a month. Blue Heron is still on the chart in week eleven. Whatever Janus is doing with this release — the roadshow strategy, the Criterion Channel partnership, the patient expansion — it's working in a way that most specialized releases don't.
The Letterboxd community's mid-year top 25 lists Blue Heron among the highest-rated films of 2026 so far, which tracks: word-of-mouth from engaged film audiences is exactly what sustains a run like this. That list — films must have at least 15,000 ratings to qualify — is a reasonable proxy for genuine audience engagement rather than critical consensus, and Blue Heron earned its place on it the slow way.
What to Watch
The next few weeks will clarify whether The Invite is a Pillion — a strong platform run that tops out around 300-400 screens — or something bigger. A24's recent behavior suggests they'll push if the numbers hold. Watch for a screen-count announcement in the next two weekends; that's the tell.
The festival calendar offers some useful framing here: with Fantasia International Film Festival opening July 16 and Venice still months out, the specialized theatrical window is unusually quiet right now — which is precisely why a film like The Invite can dominate the conversation on seven screens. There's less competition for the film-literate audience's attention than there will be come September.
Meanwhile, Blue Heron approaching $600K in limited release is the quieter milestone worth marking. In a year when the conversation about indie film has been dominated by acquisition deals, AI partnerships, and festival politics, a small film just kept finding audiences, one theater at a time. That's the ecosystem working the way it's supposed to.
