LOS ANGELES – Twenty-five years of broken bones and institutional refusal to grow up are ending today, if the cast and Paramount Pictures mean it, with the best critical reception the franchise has ever earned and the most modest opening weekend it has ever faced.
Jackass: Best and Last, directed by Jeff Tremaine and opening in U.S. theaters June 26, carries a 93 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes from 42 critics, the highest approval rating in franchise history by a meaningful margin. The domestic opening weekend is projected somewhere between $14 million and $19 million. That would be the smallest theatrical debut a Jackass feature has ever recorded. Jackass 3D opened to $50.3 million in 2010. Jackass Forever managed $23.1 million in 2022. The franchise is going out with more critical credibility than it has ever possessed and less commercial momentum than it has needed since the series began.
The gap has an explanation that does not embarrass anyone. The film combines new stunts with archival footage and previously unseen material from across the franchise’s 25-year history, a format that reads to critics as a thoughtful retrospective and reads to tracking services as something less than a wholly original installment. Paramount is not alarmed. A production budget estimated around $10 million means the film reaches profitability at an opening weekend figure the franchise has never before considered modest.
Variety called it “an amusing, slightly wistful farewell,” with the blend of new and archival material creating something closer to a valediction than a sequel. The Hollywood Reporter described “a gleeful mix of past highlights and punishing new stunts” and added, with the instinct to note the obvious, that the odds this is truly the final Jackass entry “feel slim.” Paramount and Tremaine have not formally declared a permanent end. The title is doing that work, and titles have lied before.
The full-franchise cast assembled for the farewell: Johnny Knoxville, Steve-O, Chris Pontius, Wee Man, Dave England, Danger Ehren, Preston Lacy, Rachel Wolfson, Jasper Dolphin, Dark Shark, Poopies, and Zach Holmes. Producer Spike Jonze, whose sustained involvement has lent the franchise a critical credibility that its subject matter theoretically should not support, returns alongside Tremaine and Knoxville. The franchise has always operated outside the lanes where the industry awards itself.
What separates this installment from its predecessors, according to both critical response and the cast’s own account, is its emotional register. Knoxville told journalist Elizabeth Stanton that the final day of filming was “very emotional.” He said he realized it was the last time they would ever make Jackass, and acknowledged he cried more than once. On screen, that emotion has not been edited out. It sits inside scenes of genuine camaraderie, which makes it heavier than it would be in isolation.
Steve-O, speaking on his podcast ahead of release, described the cut call on the last day as a “powerful moment,” ceremonial and meaningful. He said the film is not a surrender to nostalgia but a deliberate choice to celebrate the entire run: the best bits of the original MTV series, the four previous theatrical features, and material that has never been publicly released. The retrospective format was not a compromise. It was the concept.
Opening this weekend against Toy Story 5, which is projecting a dominant first-place finish, and Supergirl, whose own franchise launch arrives with its own set of critical and commercial contradictions, the film is unlikely to top the domestic chart. Where the final figure lands will determine whether the industry reads this opening as a graceful farewell or a signal about what remains of the audience that followed Jackass from television to multiplexes over two decades.
The franchise’s cultural arc is not contested. Jackass emerged on MTV in 2000, graduated to theatrical releases in 2002, and spent the following two decades occupying a category the film industry could not taxonomize cleanly. Critics initially dismissed it. Then they began to engage. By the time Jackass Forever arrived in 2022 with an 88 percent Rotten Tomatoes score, a consensus had formed that what Knoxville, Tremaine, and the crew had built was something more durable than a prank show: a sustained document of physical friendship, performed risk, and the specific gallows humor that sustains men who have been doing this since their twenties. The same week the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences invited its Class of 2026 into the voting rolls, Jackass was opening its declared farewell to exactly the audience that has always voted with ticket purchases rather than ballots.
The 93 percent figure says that critical consensus has deepened, not eroded. The $14 million to $19 million projection says that the segment of the audience which decides opening-weekend attendance has either not shown up in the tracking or has found the theatrical window less essential than it was in 2010. Both things can be simultaneously accurate.
What Knoxville, Tremaine, and Paramount have not committed to is what follows, or whether anything does. The film is titled Best and Last. The Hollywood Reporter’s skepticism about the word “last” is grounded in franchise history. Studios have reversed course on farewells before. The crew has offered no formal permanent commitment beyond the title. Whether this farewell is genuine or a marketing position is the one question the opening weekend’s final ticket count will not answer. That belongs to the people who made it, and they are not yet saying.
