Name: I Want Your Sex
Director: Gregg Araki
Genre: Drama, Comedy
Released: 2026-07-31T00:00:00+00:00
Duration: 90 min
Cast: Olivia Wilde, Cooper Hoffman, Mason Gooding, Chase Sui Wonders, Daveed Diggs

An artist decides a person can be raw material, and the rest is negotiation. That is the transaction at the center of I Want Your Sex, in which a celebrated provocateur named Erika Tracy hires a diffident young man to work around her studio and then reclassifies him as her muse — a subject to be used, arranged and consumed. The film treats the art-world power dynamic as an erotic contract with no fine print, and it watches what happens when the muse begins to want authorship of his own.

What keeps the setup from playing as wish fulfillment is the direction it takes. Erika’s studio is less a refuge than a closed system of desire, obsession and control, and the relationship curdles into betrayal and, before long, murder. The film is engineered as an erotic thriller that refuses to drop its comic register even as the stakes turn lethal, a harder tonal balance than either mode manages alone. Underneath the provocation sits a blunt question about whether being someone’s inspiration is a form of intimacy or a form of extraction.

The casting is the clearest statement of intent. Olivia Wilde plays Erika as an icon who has monetized her own transgression, and the part asks her to be seductive and predatory in the same gesture; the film lives or dies on whether her control reads as magnetic rather than merely cruel. Cooper Hoffman, as the muse Elliot, is set against her as softness and hesitation, the ordinary body the artist wants to remake. Charli XCX as his girlfriend and Chase Sui Wonders as his roommate mark the life Elliot is being pulled away from, while Mason Gooding and Daveed Diggs move through Erika’s orbit and Johnny Knoxville and Margaret Cho turn up as detectives once the body count starts.

Gregg Araki has spent his career treating sex as a genre engine rather than a garnish, from the queer road movies that made his name to the trauma study of Mysterious Skin and the candy-colored nihilism of his campus films. I Want Your Sex is his first theatrical feature in more than a decade, and it reads as a consolidation of that sensibility rather than a reinvention — the same conviction that desire is dangerous, now routed through the machinery of the erotic thriller. For a filmmaker who has largely worked in television across recent years, the film doubles as a wager that his particular brand of provocation still commands a theatrical audience.

That wager is Magnolia Pictures’ as much as Araki’s. Opening a hard-R erotic thriller in the back half of summer is counterprogramming by design, aimed at adults who have aged out of the season’s franchise slate and at the specific audience that still turns out for a name-brand provocateur. It is the kind of release — festival pedigree, a marquee lead working against type, a title engineered to be impossible to say on morning television — that lives or dies on conversation rather than spend. Magnolia is betting the talk does the work the marketing budget cannot.

The film’s real subject is authorship. Erika builds a persona out of other people’s bodies, and the movie is at least partly about what that costs the people she builds it from. It is a pointed thing for a filmmaker to put on screen, and the erotic-thriller frame gives Araki cover to say it while keeping the surface pleasurable. The murder plot is the mechanism; the argument underneath is about who gets to be the artist and who gets assigned the role of material.

What the film does not settle, on the evidence of its own premise, is whether it can hold its ironic distance without letting provocation harden into a pose. An erotic thriller that is also a comedy risks letting the jokes defuse the menace, or letting shock stand in for a point of view. Early festival response leaned favorable on precisely the film’s nerve, but nerve is not the same as control, and a story about exploitation has to work not to reproduce the thing it is critiquing. Whether Araki threads that needle is the question the trailer cannot answer.

Olivia Wilde in the Gregg Araki film I Want Your Sex (2026) — Olivia Wilde in *I Want Your Sex* (2026)

I Want Your Sex was written and directed by Gregg Araki and produced by Black Bear Pictures. Alongside Wilde and Hoffman, the ensemble includes Mason Gooding, Chase Sui Wonders, Charli XCX, Daveed Diggs, Johnny Knoxville, Margaret Cho and Roxane Mesquida. Tucker Korte shot the film and James Clements wrote the score, with Magnolia Pictures handling distribution.

The film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, and Magnolia Pictures opens it in select U.S. theaters on July 31, 2026, at a runtime of 90 minutes. No Spanish, Mexican or Brazilian theatrical dates have been confirmed at the time of writing. Araki has never been in the business of playing it safe, and this is the rare summer release daring the audience to look away; the interesting question is how many won’t.