‘Jackass’ Has Been Embraced by Criterion, Fulfilling a Long-Running Online Joke

We’ve talked before about Criterion, the home video company that celebrates the medium of film with prestige releases of great works of cinema, which they then use as bait to trap celebrities in their closet. Does someone want to check on Jude Law real quick and make sure that he got out okay? 

Criterion also has its very own streaming app, the Criterion Channel, which allows subscribers to pay $10.99 a month in order to feel extra guilty for binging the entirety of Riverdale while the complete films of Ingmar Bergman remain untouched. 

But the Criterion Channel doesn’t just contain foreign and arthouse classics, they’ve also expanded to include some less-obvious choices. Like how they included Tom Green’s Freddy Got Fingered in their Razzie-themed program earlier this year.

Well, next month they’ll be streaming a whole new collection, one that showcases movies that were all released by MTV Productions in the late 1990s and early 2000s, including Election, The Original Kings of Comedy, Beavis and Butt-Head Do America, and perhaps most importantly, Jackass: The Movie.

Yes, a movie that ends with a guy shoving a Hot Wheel up his butthole will now be available alongside films by Kurosawa and Fellini. 

The idea of Jackass: The Movie entering the Criterion Collection has been a running gag online for a while, with some fans even mocking up their own faux Criterion covers for the nonexistent release.

One person actually crafted custom covers for all four movies, presumably envisioning some sort of Criterion Jackass box set that would inevitably cost $300. Folks can dream, can’t they?

The closest we’ve come to getting Jackass in the Criterion Collection up to this point was the release of Robert Bresson’s 1966 French language drama Au hasard Balthazar since it's about a literal jackass.

A number of people have also sincerely argued that the Jackass series, or at least the first Jackass film, deserves to be in the Criterion Collection, which isn’t really that crazy you think about it. Jackass: The Movie is an experimental documentary, not unlike the Criterion-approved F for Fake by Orson Welles. It’s full of slapstick comedy, and Criterion has already released the films of slapstick icons Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd. Plus, Jackass: The Movie was produced by Spike Jonze, whose Being John Malkovich was already put out by Criterion.

Okay, so this will likely never happen, but the Criterion Channel release is a good start. 

Some fans did complain that Criterion’s MTV Productions collection is a little light, and missing some important entries in the MTV movie canon, like 200 Cigarettes and even their debut feature Joe’s Apartment (the one with Jerry O’Connell and a bunch of singing, dancing cockroaches).

And there's no Dead Man on Campus, either?

Wait, no, we just Googled the synopsis. Nevermind. Maybe don’t bring that one back.