Jackass: Best and Last is the Mandalorian and Grogu of bodily injury movies. Twenty-five years after a group of maniacs started filming themselves getting hurt for money, Johnny Knoxville and company ride the bull one last time, and it turns out the dumbest franchise in movies has a heart after all.
Table of Contents
Quick Take: The Weighted Verdict
Direct answer: Jackass: Best and Last (2026) is the best-reviewed film the franchise has ever produced, a wistful and genuinely moving farewell that blends brand-new stunts with a greatest-hits reel of classic footage. It trades a little novelty for a lot of heart, and the result is essential viewing for longtime fans and a surprisingly poignant send-off even for the casually curious. The only real knock is that devoted followers have already paid to see a chunk of it before.
Who should see it: Anyone who grew up with these lunatics, fans of physical slapstick comedy, and viewers who can stomach graphic gross-out material. Who can wait: The squeamish, total newcomers, and anyone allergic to the sight of a grown man volunteering for genital peril.
Instead of collapsing the film into a single number, here is how the pieces are weighted, ordered by how much each one drives the overall impression. The weight column reflects what actually matters for this specific movie, not a universal formula.
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| Factor | Weight | The Call |
|---|---|---|
| New Stunts & Gags | 25% | Still the main event, and still landing. The freshest bits cleverly turn middle age itself into the punchline. |
| Emotional Send-Off | 25% | The secret weapon. A franchise built on refusing sentiment finds real poignancy in saying goodbye. |
| Crew Chemistry | 20% | The beating heart of the whole thing. Twenty-five years of friendship is the actual subject. |
| Greatest-Hits Curation | 20% | A double-edged sword. The classic clips are joyous, but you have likely paid to see some of them already. |
| Craft & Bookends | 10% | Spike Jonze’s opening and closing sequences give the chaos a surprisingly elegant frame. |
Bottom line in one sentence: A raucous, filthy, and unexpectedly tender curtain call that earns its tears as honestly as its bruises, and goes out as the finest entry in a series that never asked to be taken seriously.
Fast facts for the answer box:
- What it is: The fifth and final mainline Jackass film, mixing new stunts with classic and never-before-seen footage.
- Who is in it: Johnny Knoxville, Steve-O, Chris Pontius, Wee Man, Preston Lacy, Dave England, and Danger Ehren, plus newer members Poopies, Zach Holmes, Jasper Dolphin, and Rachel Wolfson.
- Is this really the last one? Yes. Knoxville has confirmed it as the final Jackass film, calling it the natural place to end.
- Is it just a clip show? No. It is a hybrid of new material, archival greatest hits, and previously unaired footage.
- Age rating: R, for graphic nudity, extremely dangerous stunts, crude material throughout, pervasive language, and sexual material.
- Runtime: 1 hour 32 minutes.
The Long Goodbye
Here is a thing almost nobody would have bet on back in 2000. When a scrappy MTV show about idiots hurting themselves aired for a mere ten months across three short seasons before getting yanked, the smart money said this was a flash in the pan, a gross-out fad that would age about as gracefully as a shopping cart launched off a loading dock. A quarter of a century later, Jackass is a bona fide cultural institution, its DNA spliced into the entire architecture of YouTube, TikTok, and the modern creator economy. And now, improbably, it gets a proper send-off.
Jackass: Best and Last arrived in US theaters on June 26, 2026, positioned by everyone involved as the genuine finale. Director Jeff Tremaine, the franchise mainstay who has helmed every mainline entry, is back behind the camera, with producing muscle from Spike Jonze, Johnny Knoxville, and Shanna Zablow Newton, and Paramount Pictures handling the release. Knoxville has been unambiguous about the stakes. This is the last one. There will be no half-step sequel, no Jackass 5.5 to follow, making it only the second Jackass film to forgo that tradition. As he put it, this is the natural place to end.
The reason for that finality is written all over the film, and all over the men in it. Knoxville himself has said he can no longer perform any stunt that risks a concussion, a hard limit imposed by the brutal accounting of Jackass Forever, where a single bull encounter left him with a broken rib, a broken wrist, a concussion, and a brain hemorrhage. Bodies keep score, and these particular bodies have been keeping score for twenty-five years. That awareness, that these are middle-aged men who physically cannot keep doing this forever, is the current running underneath every pratfall, and it is what transforms Best and Last from a simple victory lap into something with an actual lump in its throat.
Old Dogs, Same Stupid Tricks
Let me reassure the faithful before anything else: this is still very much a Jackass movie. Nobody has gone soft. The new material is as committed to the bit, and to the bodily punishment, as anything the crew has ever filmed.
What is smart about the fresh stunts is how many of them are explicitly about aging, turning the crew’s advancing years into the comedy rather than pretending it away. There is a bit involving Steve-O and a robot administering a prostate exam, a gag that would have been unthinkable in the franchise’s twentysomething heyday and lands all the harder now. There is a sequence in which several of the guys down the industrial-strength concoctions people drink to prepare for a colonoscopy and then attempt to play Twister, a premise so perfectly suited to men of a certain age that it is almost elegant in its stupidity. The gross-outs, in other words, now come bundled with the recognition that middle age carries its own inherent indignities. The joke is on time itself.
The old guard still throws itself into the meat grinder with alarming enthusiasm. Knoxville submits to being run down by a bull yet again, the franchise’s most reliable and terrifying recurring nemesis. And Steve-O, by broad critical consensus, is the film’s most valuable player, going out in ways that decorum and this review’s better judgment prevent me from fully describing. Let us just say the man exits the series screaming. The newer members brought in during Jackass Forever, the fearless Poopies chief among them, once again handle some of the punishment that fortysomething and fiftysomething joints can no longer absorb, including a balance-beam bit involving an electric shock collar in a location no shock collar should ever be.
How They Filmed the Finale
For a franchise this chaotic, the making of Best and Last is its own highlight reel of near-misses, and the behind-the-scenes stories are almost as entertaining as the finished bits. Principal photography kicked off in late February 2026 in Los Angeles, with the elaborate opening sequence alone taking five full days to film, before wrapping in mid-March and returning for one final day of shooting in April in Simi Valley. Nearly the entire Jackass Forever cast returned for the sendoff.
Predictably, the shoot left a trail of bodies. Dave England ruptured a tendon in his finger during a bit that is far too undignified to detail here beyond noting it involved retrieving a coin from a very inconvenient location. Wee Man got banged up in the marathon opening sequence and was sore for weeks afterward. A couple of the wildest attempts never even made the final cut, including one in which Poopies was knocked unconscious after a tackle from a former professional football player, and another balance-beam stunt that left Rachel Wolfson with bruised ribs. Explosives specialist Tory Belleci, a veteran of the myth-testing world of cable television, turned up to lend some of his more combustible ideas, reportedly including a concept for surfing with dynamite. And in the this-is-why-we-have-lawyers department, at least one proposed bit involving a light-up prosthetic for Dave England was scrapped before it could be filmed. The franchise may be ending, but its capacity for self-inflicted disaster clearly never wavered.
The farewell was staged as an event, too. In the weeks before release, the crew hosted a block party at the Paramount studio lot, an IGN livestream, and a full theatrical marathon of every mainline Jackass film at a Los Angeles cinema, before a special premiere at the BFI IMAX in London. For a group that started out filming stunts for a skateboarding magazine on a shoestring, the scale of the goodbye is its own quiet punchline.
Is It Just a Clip Show?
This is the fairest question to ask, and the honest answer is a qualified no. Best and Last is a hybrid by design, deliberately interweaving brand-new stunts with a curated reel of the franchise’s greatest hits, plus a selection of footage that was filmed over the years but never broadcast or included in previous films. It is, as one critic aptly put it, a greatest-hits tour by a legendary band, the kind of farewell concert where the classics share the setlist with a few new tracks.
The nostalgia is genuinely joyous. A candid-camera prank from 2002, in which Knoxville camouflages himself on a golf course and torments players with rudely timed airhorn blasts, was a highlight of the very first film and remains a highlight here, a reminder that this crew’s comedy was never solely dependent on extreme physical suffering. Many of the biggest laughs still come from the simplest possible setups. A man steps on a rake. A man takes a football to the groin. This is Buster Keaton by way of a skate-video sensibility, and the argument that these guys are the twenty-first century’s answer to silent-comedy legends is strongest precisely in these low-tech, high-timing moments.
The one legitimate drawback is baked into the format. If you are a devoted fan, you have almost certainly already paid to see a decent portion of this footage, whether in theaters, on disc, or on streaming. There is an unavoidable double-dip quality to charging admission for material audiences already own. But here is the thing the film is banking on, and mostly earns: real fans will not care. The classic bits hit differently when they are framed as a farewell, recontextualized as the highlight reel of a shared quarter-century. The curation is a memory exercise as much as a comedy one, and that reframing is enough to justify the ticket.
The Ghosts in the Room
You cannot mount a twenty-five-year retrospective of this franchise without reckoning with absence, and Best and Last does not shy away from it. The film incorporates old footage that pays tribute to Ryan Dunn, the beloved crew member who died in a car accident in 2011, weaving his presence back into the fabric of the group’s story. It also includes archival material featuring Bam Margera, whose painful and public falling-out with the crew during the production of Jackass Forever had removed him from the previous film.
These inclusions matter more than they might in a lesser project, because mortality and the passage of time are, in the end, what Best and Last is secretly about. A franchise that spent its early years gleefully refusing sentiment, consequence, or any hint of an emotional arc suddenly has all three, whether it wants them or not. Seeing these faces again, some gone, some estranged, some simply older and more battered, gives the whole enterprise a weight its rowdy predecessors never carried. The film does not belabor these moments. It does not need to. Their mere presence does the work.
Craft in the Chaos
It would be easy to assume a Jackass movie is pointed and shot with all the care of a home video, but that has never quite been true, and Best and Last is arguably the most thoughtfully constructed of the bunch. Producer Spike Jonze, an Academy Award-winning filmmaker in his own right, personally directed the opening and closing sequences, and those bookends give the mayhem a surprisingly elegant frame. There is real filmmaking craft here, a sense of structure and rhythm that elevates the material above pure shock content.
That craft is, in fact, part of what separates Jackass from its countless imitators. In 2026, when equivalent gross-out and pain-based content is largely the domain of anonymous, disposable social-media clips executed with little skill and less warmth, the sheer flair and good cheer of a professionally mounted Jackass production feels almost quaint, and genuinely refreshing. These maniacs are, and always have been, craftsmen. The stunts are rigorously planned, the timing is honed, and the camaraderie is real. The difference between a Jackass bit and a viral pain compilation is the difference between a comedy troupe and a car crash.
Is Jackass: Best and Last Worth Seeing in Theaters?
For the intended audience, absolutely, and the reason is communal rather than cinematic. Jackass has always been a group experience, a comedy of shared wincing, and there is no better venue for it than a packed theater full of people gasping and howling in unison. The film’s whole spirit is about friendship and doing ill-advised things together, and watching it surrounded by strangers having the same visceral reaction replicates that spirit in a way a living-room screen simply cannot.
The critical reception backs this up emphatically. Best and Last opened to the strongest reviews in franchise history, debuting around 93 percent on Rotten Tomatoes before settling into a Certified Fresh score in the high eighties, with a warm audience score in the mid eighties to match. That is a genuine milestone. The previous franchise high belonged to Jackass Forever at 86 percent, and none of the first three films ever cleared 70. The critics consensus zeroes in on exactly the quality that makes this one special, praising the surprising poignancy achieved by a series about friends terrorizing one another, and noting that the swan song hurts so good. Reviewers across the board, from RogerEbert.com to Variety, landed on the same word again and again: emotion. As Variety observed, you leave believing that these guys will actually miss all this, and that belief is contagious enough to make you miss it too.
If the film has a ceiling, it is twofold. First, the hybrid structure and the inherent repetition of a greatest-hits format keep it from feeling as fresh and dangerous as the franchise at its peak. This is a curtain call, not a reinvention. Second, and more pointedly, some of the newer blood introduced in Jackass Forever gets short-changed. Rachel Wolfson in particular has frustratingly little to do, a recurring note in the reviews, and the film’s understandable focus on the original crew’s farewell leaves the next generation feeling more like guests than heirs. It is a natural consequence of a movie about saying goodbye to specific people, but it does mean the newcomers who were meant to carry the torch mostly stand near it.
The film does find room for some inspired cameo firepower, though, with famous friends of the franchise turning up to send the crew off in style, a testament to how far this scruffy operation has traveled from its skate-video origins. Even A-list Hollywood wanted to be in the room when the idiots took their bow.
Taken together, these are quibbles rather than dealbreakers. As curtain calls go, this one is close to ideal.
Marching to the Box Office
Commercially, Best and Last is going out quietly even as it goes out on a critical high. The film opened to roughly 8.4 million dollars domestically across its three-day debut from about 2,800 theaters, the lowest opening weekend in the franchise’s theatrical history. Add in a modest 1.9 million from international markets and the global debut lands around 10.3 million. For context, 2010’s Jackass 3D exploded to a 50.3 million dollar opening, and even the pandemic-era Jackass Forever managed 23.1 million four years ago.
Before anyone reads this as a failure, the math tells a gentler story. The film was made cheaply, at an estimated production budget of around 10 million dollars, which means its break-even target is far lower than a typical studio release. It also entered one of the most brutal corridors on the summer calendar, opening behind the juggernaut second weekend of Toy Story 5, the debut of Supergirl, and the ongoing run of the sleeper hit Obsession. The rollout was staggered globally as well, opening across most of Europe on June 25, a day ahead of the domestic bow, and reaching Australia and New Zealand on July 2, which gives the finale a long tail of international frames still to come. A franchise finale is not built to top the charts. It is built to give the fans a proper goodbye and complete its run in the black, and on both counts it is positioned to succeed. There is a fitting irony in the least commercially explosive Jackass film being the most critically embraced. After a lifetime of chasing shocks, the crew finally earned respect right as the receipts got modest.
Film Specifications
| Detail | Information |
|---|---|
| Title | Jackass: Best and Last |
| Year | 2026 |
| Director | Jeff Tremaine |
| Opening and Closing Sequences Directed by | Spike Jonze |
| Producers | Jeff Tremaine, Spike Jonze, Johnny Knoxville, Shanna Zablow Newton |
| Studio | Gorilla Flicks, Dickhouse Entertainment, Domain Entertainment |
| Distributor | Paramount Pictures |
| Principal Cast | Johnny Knoxville, Steve-O, Chris Pontius, Jason “Wee Man” Acuña, Preston Lacy, Dave England, Ehren McGhehey, Sean “Poopies” McInerney, Zach Holmes, Davon “Jasper” Wilson, Rachel Wolfson |
| Archival Tributes | Ryan Dunn, Bam Margera |
| Filming Locations | Los Angeles and Simi Valley, California |
| Runtime | 92 minutes (1 hour 32 minutes) |
| Aspect Ratio | 2.39:1 |
| MPA Rating | R (graphic nudity, extremely dangerous stunts, crude material throughout, pervasive language, sexual material) |
| Premiere | BFI IMAX, London, June 15, 2026 |
| US Theatrical Release | June 26, 2026 |
Disc Specifications are not yet available. Jackass: Best and Last is currently in its theatrical window. This section will be updated with the full home video technical breakdown once a physical release is confirmed.
Looking Ahead to the Home Release
For the collectors in the audience, the outlook is promising, if unconfirmed. No 4K UHD or Blu-ray street date has been announced yet, which is entirely normal for a film less than two weeks into its theatrical run. Given that Paramount has released every prior mainline Jackass entry on physical media, and given that the franchise has a devoted collector base, a disc release feels less like a hope than an inevitability. Digital availability is already being teased through bundle promotions built around the broader Jackass catalog, so the streaming and rental window will almost certainly open well before a disc lands.
When that disc does arrive, it is worth thinking about how the material will play at home. A good chunk of Best and Last is sourced from decades of older footage of wildly varying formats and resolutions, from early-2000s standard-definition MTV material to modern high-resolution cameras, so a 4K presentation will be a patchwork by nature rather than a uniform showcase. The new material, however, shot on contemporary equipment and framed in a 2.39:1 scope ratio, should look and sound excellent, and a proper release would ideally include the deleted and extended stunts that had to be cut for the theatrical version, of which there are reportedly several notable ones. We will publish the full technical teardown, extras rundown, and a revised weighted verdict the moment a disc is in hand.
The Verdict
Jackass: Best and Last had no business being this good, or this affecting. A greatest-hits compilation stitched together with new stunts, released a full twenty-five years after the joke began, should by all rights feel exhausted. Instead it feels like a wake thrown by the guest of honor, a filthy, funny, wildly dangerous celebration that somehow sneaks up and gets you right in the chest.
The formula still works. The new bits are inspired, cannily mining the crew’s own aging for laughs that hit harder than the shock value alone ever could. The classic clips, framed as farewell, land with unexpected warmth. And running through all of it is the thing this franchise was secretly always about: a group of friends who found a way to spend their entire adult lives together doing something joyful and idiotic and utterly their own. That the film knows this, and lets itself feel it, is what pushes it past mere nostalgia into something close to moving.
It is not the most dangerous Jackass movie, nor the freshest, and the double-dip nature of the greatest-hits format is a legitimate quibble. But as a final bow, it is very nearly perfect. The idiots earned this one. Go say goodbye to them properly, in a theater, with your own dumb little buddies at your side. It is the last time you will get the chance.
Jackass: Best and Last is playing in theaters now. A home video review will follow when the disc is released.
