Gregg Araki, the filmmaker behind the Teen Apocalypse Trilogy of the 1990s, has turned his lens on the contemporary art world. His new film I Want Your Sex, an erotic comedy distributed by Magnolia Pictures, satirises the scene with a cast led by Olivia Wilde and Cooper Hoffman.

Wilde plays Erika Tracy, a multidisciplinary artist in the mould of Erika Lust, the filmmaker known for erotic cinema. Hoffman, last seen in Paul Thomas Anderson's Licorice Pizza, is Elliot, her studio assistant. Their relationship turns physical — and specifically into a BDSM dynamic — which Elliot later recounts from a police interrogation room. The film opens with a flash-forward: Erika face-down and unresponsive in a swimming pool, an homage to the opening of Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard (1950). Charli xcx appears as Elliot's girlfriend, while Margaret Cho and Johnny Knoxville play police officers. The trailer, released in June, previewed the tone with a prop array that included ball gags, whips and strap-ons (Variety).

The film had its premiere at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival in January, then screened at the Sarasota Film Festival in Sarasota, Florida. Magnolia acquired U.S. rights in February in a seven-figure deal, as reported by Deadline (Deadline). By late July, The Art Newspaper had published a full review describing it as an art-world satire (The Art Newspaper). The Hollywood Reporter classified the film as an erotic comedy built around the age gap between the two leads (The Hollywood Reporter).

At the end of July, Araki discussed the film at Outfest, the LGBTQ+ film festival in Los Angeles, where he revealed he had used an intimacy coordinator on set — a specialist who choreographs sex scenes to ensure performers' boundaries are respected (Variety).

What makes the film jump out is the collision of Araki's punk-rooted sensibility with a target that takes itself very seriously: the self-mythologising apparatus of galleries, studios and artist personae. The Sunset Boulevard reference is a signal, not an accident — a story about power, desire and a body in a pool, transposed from Hollywood's golden age into a studio full of whips and unfinished canvases. Whether the satire lands is for critics to decide. The film exists, the cast is signed, and Magnolia is putting it in front of audiences.