Who’s The Jackass Now?

No one could have predicted how much fun it was going to be watching as the music industry, having tried to ignore the power of the internet for ages, suddenly realised it was being over run and was well and truly in the shit.

And if the music world getting its knickers in a twist about the internet wasn't entertaining enough, now the world of getting baby crocodiles to bite your nipples and drinking mouthfuls of horse-sperm is up in arms about it, too. In short, the new Jackass movie will be released on the internet for free tomorrow.

First, there was Damon Albarn grumbling about the immorality of downloading - it was stealing the livelihoods of musicians - right about the time he decided not to employ any in favour of making a band out of cartoon characters instead.

Radiohead, allowed people to ‘pay what they thought was fair’ when they downloaded In Rainbows from their website. You had to feel bad for the boys. Having less than half the people pay anything at all must have been a bit of a kick in the nuts. It’s like playing that game when you close your eyes and fall backward, trusting your friends to catch you, except when you look round you realise everyone’s pissed off except a little fat kid with asthma.

The best though, was the talisman of raw sexuality and groundbreaking funkiness that is Prince, electing to release his album free through the Daily Mail. Anyone who works for his label this side of the Atlantic could have mentioned that for the Mail, raw sexuality is generally linked to the problem of single mothers and the concept of being groundbreaking is not generally associated with a paper which still leads with a picture of a decade dead princess every bastard day. An amusing upshot of this is that the man who conquered the world with songs like Purple Rain has now had his latest work categorised as a Daily Mail giveaway. This puts him on a level par with such entertainment doyens as Bob the Builder, Balamory, Linguaphone Spanish and Rosemary and Thyme.

With this in mind, hecklerspray was interested to see what the film business, also at increasing risk of losing out to the internet, would be doing. This week the first move is being made, but not from where you’d think. Step aside Spielberg, this is a job for a bunch of hicks with a penchant for self mutilation - ladies and gentlemen, Johnny Knoxville and the Jackass boys!

Jackass, like a bourbon-fuelled You’ve Been Framed was a phenomenon five years back that gave baked students a much needed opportunity to shout "Awww dude!" at the TV after they came back from the pub. Three series and two films later and it would appear that Johnny and the lads have once again reneged on their promise not to make any more with tomorrow's arrival of Jackass 2.5.

The twist is, Jackass 2.5 is free and solely on the internet for the first two weeks. The loss of revenue at the cinema is to be balanced by having advertisers pay huge sums to get their messages embedded in the download. Money is also hoping to be raised from charging for the download and DVDs after the initial free period.

The clever bit about this whole thing, and the point where you realise that they’re more than just eye candy over at Paramount, is the way this film has been made and how they’ve planned for the long term. They’ve recognised that short videos of people kicking the shit out of each other is doing good trade in the world of YouTube et al and that what they have with Jackass the granddaddy of the genre. Paramount president Thomas Lesinski has already stated his intention to later chop up the film into five-minute segments. We reckon with the pull the name will bring on such sites can get a disgusting amount of money from people who want their ads embedded in them. A 21st century version of money for old rope, you could say.

But it doesn’t stop there; the majority of the footage for Jackass 2.5 was actually filmed but not used at the time of shooting Jackass Number 2, which has already grossed in excess of $84 million. Effectively, this means their experiment is costing them bugger all! We’ll bet their musical cousins are sick with envy.

With this in mind it has given all of us here a different take on the new year, laden with expense (mortgages, victim reparations, line dancing subscriptions) that’s just around the corner. Needless to say, if you come by the hecklerspray office over the next few weeks and find someone in a pair of Ray Bans unconscious with their bollocks stapled to their leg, you will know the reason why.  

Read more:

Paramount to Disseminate Latest Jackass Movie Online - Marketing Vox

[story by Matthew Loader]