The Jackass Phenomenon

In three short days, Jackass 3-D has set several box office records. With a whopping $50 million dollar opening, it is beat Scary Movie 3 ($48.1 million) as the biggest October opening ever. Against a $20 million production budget and roughly $40 million advertising budget, the film will make its money back sometime around Thursday. Of course, the $3 3-D up-charge also plays into the astounding gross, but the studios predicted just a $30 million opening. Also, at $50 million, it’s already the fifth highest grossing non-fiction documentary ever (c’mon, its kind of a documentary). It might even break the $119 million mark set by Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11. Johnny Knoxville and Spike Jonze (Being John Malkovich, Where the Wild Things Are) produced under their Dickhouse banner (a subsidiary of Paramount Pictures).

However, the success of Jackass 3-D also resonates on a higher level. In these turbulent economic times, American audiences want to go see movies where they can turn their brains off and enjoy the physical humor. Notice I wrote “American” audiences, not all audiences. While one might assume the Jackass movies would fare well internationally (I mean they’re not exactly dialogue-driven), they perform far worse than most movies. Most films get 40-50% of their grosses internationally but the two previous Jackass movies have gotten 19.2% and 14%, respectively.

What does this say about American audiences? Are we stupider than the international crowd? Not necessarily. We just like the ball-busting, America’s Funniest Home Videos/Tosh.O type of painful, hard-to-watch humor more than other countries. The American audience has been so desensitized to pain and violence (mainly through videogames but also other media) that we need to resort to polar extremes to get our kicks. The Jackass movies continually push the envelope and give us the fix we need. So how many times do Americans have to see Steve-O get hit in the balls before we’ve had enough?  As long as they keep thinking of cruder ways to do it, I’ll keep buying tickets.