Spa Weekend Opens in Cinemas as Isla Fisher, Leslie Mann and Anna Faris Chase the Female Hangover

Verified key facts

• Spa Weekend opens in US cinemas on Friday 21 August 2026, per Fandango
• The film stars Isla Fisher, Leslie Mann, Anna Faris and Michelle Buteau, written and directed by Jon Lucas and Scott Moore
• IndieWire's review called it a messy, unhinged, sometimes funny film whose cast deserves better material
• The Guardian described it as a female answer to The Hangover
• People reported the cast made TikTok dance videos when a cyclone halted filming
• The film runs 1 hour 37 minutes and is set at a Palm Springs spa resort

A starry check-in at Palm Springs

Spa Weekend arrives in cinemas on Friday carrying one of the most bankable comedy casts assembled in years. Isla Fisher, Leslie Mann, Anna Faris and Michelle Buteau headline the story of three best friends — Jane, Coco and Sophie — whose restorative break at a Palm Springs spa resort collapses into chaos when their trainwreck friend Mel arrives uninvited.

The pedigree behind the camera is equally deliberate. Writers-directors Jon Lucas and Scott Moore wrote The Hangover and made the Bad Moms films, and Spa Weekend is unmistakably an attempt to fuse the two: the escalating debauchery of the former grafted onto the female friendship engine of the latter, compressed into a brisk 97 minutes.

The critics check out early

The reviews landing ahead of release have been pointed. IndieWire, in a review published Thursday, called the film messy, unhinged and sometimes funny, arguing under the headline that these funny women deserve a much better break — praise for the ensemble wrapped around a verdict on the script.

The Guardian was more playful in its assessment, describing the film as a female answer to The Hangover that spreads the slush with the massage oil, crediting the cast's chemistry while noting the machinery creaks. The harshest notice came from a Yahoo critic who suggested the only way to watch it was drunk on a flight.

Four comedians in search of a film

What no reviewer disputes is the wattage of the ensemble. Fisher, returning to the broad comedy that made Wedding Crashers a phenomenon, plays against Mann's practised suburban exasperation, while Faris — in her most prominent film role in years — and the reliably scene-stealing Buteau round out the quartet.

IndieWire's review singled out the performers' willingness to commit to the film's wildest swings, a spirited foursome elevating material that repeatedly reaches for shock where it needs wit. It is the kind of notice that historically matters less to opening audiences than to the long tail of streaming, where forgiving viewers meet star-driven comedies on their own terms.

The casting also carries a quiet generational point. All four leads built their careers in the 2000s comedy boom, an era whose leading women were routinely handed the thankless-girlfriend role while the men got the chaos. Spa Weekend hands them the chaos, and even the film's detractors concede the quartet seizes it with visible relish.

A production with its own disaster story

The film arrives trailing an on-set legend of its own. People reported that when a cyclone halted filming — the production shot portions of its resort exteriors in storm-prone territory — the four leads passed the shutdown making bikini TikTok dance videos, footage that has since become part of the film's marketing bloodstream.

That anecdote has done real promotional work. The cast's off-screen friendship, performed across press junkets and social feeds, is central to the sell: a comedy about women behaving badly, marketed by women plainly having fun. Whether that goodwill converts at the box office is Friday's question.

The last laugh of a thin comedy summer

Spa Weekend opens into a marketplace starved of live-action comedy. The genre's theatrical retreat has been one of the decade's defining industry stories, and an R-rated, star-led studio comedy opening wide in late August is now rare enough to be an event by default.

Rival studios will watch the weekend closely. A solid opening would strengthen the argument that mid-budget comedies still earn their theatrical window; a stumble would push the next batch straight to streaming. The late-August slot is traditionally forgiving, with modest competition from holdovers and a clear run at audiences seeking air conditioning and low stakes.

History offers the film a template. Several of the past decade's most profitable comedies opened soft in late summer and earned out on word of mouth among exactly the audience Spa Weekend courts: groups of friends turning a cinema trip into a night out. The film's marketing has leaned into that framing without subtlety, and the strategy has worked before.

The Hangover formula, fifteen years on

Lucas and Moore's career has been a long experiment in one question: how many times can the premise of respectable adults losing control sustain a franchise? From The Hangover through Bad Moms, the formula has proved remarkably durable, even as critics tired of it long before audiences did.

Spa Weekend tests whether the formula survives its transfer to a wellness-industry setting, a target so ripe — sound baths, cold plunges, alkaline everything — that several critics wished the film had satirised it harder. The consensus: the spa is a backdrop, the friendship is the film, and the jokes land or miss on the cast's conviction alone.

An August 21 opening against the streaming clock

The film's commercial fate will be read quickly. Opening-weekend numbers arrive Sunday, and with a modest budget by studio-comedy standards, Spa Weekend does not need Hangover money to succeed — it needs to prove that four beloved comic actresses can still pull adults off their sofas.

For Fisher, trending searches this week suggest the audience curiosity is real. Whatever the critics' reservations, the star of the weekend's only new wide-release comedy has the spotlight to herself — and in late August, that has often been enough.

The Sunday estimates will render the first verdict, the Monday actuals the truer one. Between now and then, four of Hollywood's most durable comic performers are betting that an audience which grew up with them still wants to laugh with them — preferably somewhere with air conditioning.

Sources

• IndieWire - 'Spa Weekend' Review: These Funny Women Deserve a Much Better Break
• The Guardian - Spa Weekend review
• People - The Spa Weekend Cast Made Bikini TikTok Dance Videos When a Cyclone Halted Filming
• Fandango - Spa Weekend (2026) Tickets & Showtimes