I Love Boosters

I Love Boosters
Theatrical release poster
Directed by	Boots Riley
Written by	Boots Riley
Produced by	Aaron Ryder Andrew Swett Allison Rose Carter Jon Read
Starring	Keke Palmer Naomi Ackie Taylour Paige Poppy Liu Eiza González LaKeith Stanfield Will Poulter Don Cheadle Demi Moore
Cinematography	Natasha Braier
Edited by	Matthew Hannam Terel Gibson
Music by	Tune-Yards
Production company	Annapurna Pictures[1]
Distributed by	Neon (United States and Canada) Focus Features Universal Pictures (International)
Release dates	March 12, 2026 (2026-03-12) (SXSW) May 22, 2026 (2026-05-22) (United States)
Running time	114 minutes[2]
Country	United States
Language	English
Budget	$20 million[3]
Box office	$9 million[4][5]

I Love Boosters is a 2026 American absurdist crime comedy film written and directed by Boots Riley. Following the adventures of a group of shoplifters, it features an ensemble cast that includes Keke Palmer, Naomi Ackie, Taylour Paige, Poppy Liu, Eiza González, LaKeith Stanfield, Will Poulter, Don Cheadle, and Demi Moore.

The film premiered at the 2026 South by Southwest Film & TV Festival on March 12, 2026, and was released theatrically in the United States by Neon on May 22. It received positive reviews from critics, but underperformed at the box office, making only $9 million on a budget of $20 million.^[6][5][4]

In the San Francisco Bay Area, Corvette, Mariah, and Sade (known collectively as the "Velvet Gang") regularly shoplift from the Metro Designers fashion chain run by designer Christie Smith. They sell the clothes they steal at a discount to make ends meet. Christie regularly appears in the media discussing her vision of fashion as transformative art. In one appearance, she lambasts the Velvet Gang as "low class, urban bitches."

Corvette, an aspiring fashion designer and admirer of Christie's work, sneaks into Christie's office inside a coffee cart, overhearing Christie’s mention of $100,000 suits. While trying to sneak out, she is spotted by Christie; she provides a false name but shares her authentic admiration of Christie, and tells her that she designs clothes herself. Corvette repeatedly encounters a mysterious man with a pinky ring. Sade relates a story of a friend who hooked up with the man, who turned into a demon and sucked out her soul while performing oral sex on her.

The Velvet Gang get jobs at a Metro Designers store, planning to steal its inventory. Corvette realizes one of Christie's new items is identical to one of her designs. Before the gang can enact the heist, their store is cleared out by someone else; surveillance footage shows a woman sucking all the merchandise into her bag. The gang track her down and capture her. The woman, Jianhu, reveals she is a worker at a Metro Designers factory in China. Due to the factory's poor working conditions, Jianhu's aunt died, and her mother has developed cancer. With her cousin, Li Pan, she discovered that the facility acquired teleporters to save on shipping costs. They stole the devices, and Jianhu is teleporting Metro Designers merchandise back to China to gain leverage in demanding better pay and working conditions for the factory workers. The Velvet Gang and Jianhu team up.

The gang's former coworker Violeta tries to convince them to help her fight the poor working conditions at Metro Designers, but they decline. With Violeta's help, they discover that the teleporter devices have two other settings based on dialectical materialism: the "situational accelerator", which heightens the conflicts inherent in whatever it is pointed at, and a "deconstruction" setting, which takes apart whatever it is pointed at into the elements that made it. After deconstructing some Metro Designers clothes, Jianhu sees that a cut on her hand has healed, as the cost of her labor has been returned back to her body.

The Velvet Gang and Jianhu infiltrate a Metro Designers fashion show with the help of the pinky ring man and use the devices to deconstruct the clothes. They find a room where the $100,000 suits are. The suits are worn by prominent media figures, who the gang order to remove the suits, but they also remove their skin: the $100,000 suits are skin suits designed by Christie for them to wear for propaganda purposes. The Velvet Gang flees the scene, escaping from both the police and the skinless people.

Corvette and Sade argue, as Corvette wants to destroy the $100,000 suits, and Sade wants to sell them to guarantee her children's future. Corvette agrees to sell them, sending Sade away with the suits as she uses the device to move between China and the US, running from authorities in both settings, as the factory employees band together to protect Corvette and Li Pan. The Velvet Gang reunite back at the fashion show where Violeta has staged a small protest. They use the devices on the "situational accelerator" setting to amplify the protests at both the show and the factory into strikes.

Some time later, a news report details that the strikes spread across the world and that workers have made significant gains. Jianhu finds that by deconstructing the clothes with the device, her mother's cancer has reversed as well. The man with the pinky ring admits to being a soul-sucking demon but asks Corvette to be with him anyway, saying that true love will turn him into a human; she declines to enter a relationship where she cannot receive oral sex. The Velvet Gang open a community center selling affordable clothes.

The film is written and directed by Boots Riley, and is based on the song "I Love Boosters!" by his group the Coup.^[3] Aaron Ryder and Andrew Swett are producing the film on behalf of Ryder Picture Company. Financing came from Annapurna Pictures,^[1] Neon, and Waypoint Entertainment. In October 2024, the ensemble cast was reported to include Keke Palmer, Demi Moore, LaKeith Stanfield, Naomi Ackie, Eiza González, Poppy Liu, Taylour Paige and Will Poulter.^[1][7] Melissa Barrera was offered a role personally by Riley but had to decline owing to her scheduling conflicts; Barrera herself stated it was intended to be her comeback role after being blacklisted from the film industry.^[8] Principal photography began on November 7, 2024, in Atlanta,^[9] with Natasha Braier serving as the cinematographer.^[10]

The film score was composed and performed by Tune-Yards, released May 22, 2026. Riley and Palmer recorded an original soundtrack EP for the film as well, which was released May 8, 2026. The songs were written by Alina Kanin, Ben Boye, Mike Aaberg, Jesse Strauss, Lauren Palmer, Dominic Dalay, and Joel Robinow.^[11][12][13] The first single from the EP, "2-D", was released April 17, 2026. Both projects were released through Neon.

I Love Boosters had its world premiere as the opening film at the South by Southwest Film & TV Festival on March 12, 2026. It is also the opening film on May 7 for the 2026 Seattle International Film Festival.^[14] Neon scheduled the United States release for May 22, 2026, with a simultaneous release in Canada.^[15][16] In November 2025, Riley revealed that, like his previous film Sorry to Bother You, international distribution of I Love Boosters would be handled by Focus Features and Universal Pictures.^[17]

On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 92% of 141 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 7.4/10. The website's consensus reads: "A raucous capitalist critique, I Love Boosters careens through the carefully-controlled chaos of writer-director Boots Riley's imagination to deliver a comedy that's as funny as it is thought-provoking."^[18]

Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 70 out of 100, based on 34 critics, indicating "generally favorable" reviews.^[19] Audiences surveyed by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B" on an A+ to F scale.^[20]

Amy Nicholson of the Los Angeles Times called I Love Boosters "a maximalist delight", describing the film as "agit-prop that prioritizes entertaining the crowd. It roils with observations about teamwork, inequality and success, but presents as a spangled, stoner-comedy extravaganza with the moxie to give a Monty Python-esque raspberry to realism."^[21] The Boston Globe's Odie Henderson gave the film a score of three out of four stars, and wrote: "I have to give Boots Riley credit for not only creating a movie as absolutely bananas as I Love Boosters, but for also anchoring it with an angry demand to respect the working class. His entire cast is game to play along, especially Palmer and Moore, who are both delightful."^[22]

The New York Times critic Maya Phillips highlighted Palmer's performance and the costume and production design, and wrote that, "even with Riley's expert skill for quirky tonal shifts in dialogue and visual humor, some of the wackiness in the movie is more cartoonishly shopworn than his more innovative swerves [...] at the expense of a more coherent and biting political message."^[23] The Guardian's Radheyan Simonpillai gave the film three out of five stars, calling it "brash and outrageously funny" but writing that, "while every actor gets to make a brash and indelible impression, their characters can feel frustratingly limited. We don't really get intimate with Corvette and her crew, to know and adore them enough to hang on when the plot goes haywire."^[24]

• I Love Boosters at IMDb