Neon built its name on austerity — Parasite, Anatomy of a Fall, Anora, the kind of festival prestige that treats a wide release as a coronation. So the sharper bet buried inside The Wrong Girls isn’t the weed jokes; it’s the distributor. Handing a broad, cat-voiced stoner comedy a nationwide push is Neon widening a lane it usually keeps deliberately narrow, buying comedy reach at the exact moment prestige alone stopped guaranteeing theatrical urgency.

As Deadline framed it in its first notice out of the premiere, the film is a two-hander built on chemistry: Kristen Stewart and Alia Shawkat as Frankie and Molly, codependent best friends whose stoned haze curdles into a mistaken-identity spiral that upends both their lives. It is writer-director Dylan Meyer’s feature debut — and, more pointedly, the script that first brought Meyer and Stewart together more than a decade ago, now Stewart’s wife directing her.

That origin story reframes the whole enterprise. Stewart has spent the last two years moving behind the camera herself, her own directorial debut The Chronology of Water arriving via the Cannes circuit, and here she hands the reins to the partner whose screenplay started their relationship. Shawkat — the deadpan engine of Arrested Development and Search Party — is the ideal foil, a signal that Meyer is betting on lived-in comic rhythm over plot machinery.

Meyer stacks the margins with ringers: Tony Hale, Geena Davis, LaKeith Stanfield, Zack Fox and Kate McKinnon, with Seth Rogen and Kumail Nanjiani voicing the leads’ fluffy black cats — a gag that doubles as a casting flex. It is the kind of comedy bench Neon has rarely assembled, and it reads as the distributor treating the film not as a curio but as a crowd-pleaser it fully intends to sell wide.

Neon and the American Cinematheque hosted the premiere at Los Angeles’ Los Feliz 3 on August 5, with Stewart, Shawkat, Hale, Davis and Meyer in attendance. The film opens in U.S. theaters nationwide on August 14.

The image that lingers isn’t the smoke — it’s a prestige label that mints Oscar campaigns steering two voice-acted house cats into multiplexes, and daring the late-summer season to call it beneath them.

Tags: Kristen Stewart, Alia Shawkat, directorial debut, Dylan Meyer, Neon, stoner comedy