On November 11, 2026, Variety listed The Fun Lady, a comedy about the home-party sex-toy business, among the titles generating buzz at the American Film Market, and The Hollywood Reporter followed with a feature on the project. Jessica Alba stars and also produces through her Metalmark Entertainment banner. Andy Tennant, director of Sweet Home Alabama and Hitch, directs from a script by Mark Steilen (Tag, Shameless). Highland Film Group is handling international sales at AFM. THR says production is due to start early next year.

Why It Matters

Party-plan selling was how many American women first bought a vibrator: through a friend, in someone's living room, with no adult store involved. That channel still exists through companies like Pure Romance, whose [24-hour livestream and retail push](/stories/pure-romance-live-shopping-retailcurrent) we covered on October 31. A mainstream comedy with an A-list star and a celebrity-entrepreneur producer, centred on a woman learning about her own pleasure, is the kind of pop-culture moment that helps normalise the category, much as *Sex and the City* did for the Rabbit. For brands, it suggests a 2027–28 marketing opportunity. For the industry, it is a reminder that its most effective early sales channel depended on trust between women, not on technology.

The film is based on Linda Brewer, the Arkansas woman profiled in a 2004 New York Times Magazine story titled "Everything a Happily Married Bible Belt Woman Always Wanted to Know About Sex but Was Afraid to Ask." Brewer went from high-school dropout to one of the top sellers for Passion Parties, the California party-plan company that sold lotions, games, lingerie and vibrators at in-home gatherings. In the film, Alba plays Mora, who moves back to her parents' small Arkansas hometown after her life falls apart, starts selling sex toys despite never having had an orgasm, and becomes the town's "Fun Lady," turning awkward living-room parties into, as THR puts it, "the hottest invitation in town." Tennant says Brewer, who has since died, worked closely with Steilen during the writing and that her children want to see the film made.

Tennant told THR the film is "not comedy with a capital C." He described it as being about "the suppression of female sexual identity" and marriages that play out "in a selfish way," and said Alba "takes it incredibly seriously."

Sources

Update — 2026-11-12

Initial entry — story first created.