Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa was rumoured a while back, but there hadn’t really been anything concrete about the project since then. That is, until last week, when Paramount announced that not only does the film exist, but that it has been filmed, edited, and will be released in October. Johnny Knoxville’s ‘bad grandpa’ character, later named as Irving Zisman, has always featured throughout Jackass in some form or another, but it never seemed like an obvious choice for sustaining a feature-length movie.
In an interview with USA Today, director Jeff Tremaine shared those concerns:
We both had reservations only because we had never fleshed the character out and didn’t know if it could sustain for a movie… Then we decided to come up with a story, and the story became really important. Yet it still houses these pranks which are shot in the real world with real unsuspecting people.
So it seems like the film will follow the Borat model of real-life pranks combined with a vague story that enables those shenanigans. The story in this case, as with Borat, is that of a road trip – Zisman is forced to travel across the country with his wayward grandson Billy, to find the child’s father after his mother is sent to jail.
Zisman and grandson Billy are shown below:
The film is a surprising installment in the Jackass series, but makes sense as far as progression goes. Since the death of key member Ryan Dunn in 2011, there would be a giant bearded hole in the cast that would require a big pair of viking shoes to fill. This allows the brand to continue and remain fresh, without diluting it or appearing to compromise quality in any way. And if it’s half as funny as Borat then the guys have it made.
Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa is released in cinemas on October 25th.