Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol Are Back for a Time-Traveling Adventure in New ‘Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie’ Image [Exclusive]

It’s not a show at The Rivoli, but lifelong friends Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol will soon be bound for the big screen with Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie. The duo has come a long way from their mockumentary web seriesNirvanna the Band the Show in 2007, in which they played fictionalized versions of themselves trying to make it big through publicity stunts as the improvisational piano and spoken word group Nirvanna the Band. After turning the edgy and riotous sitcom into a proper Canadian television series on Viceland, they’re now taking the show on the road in February with an ambitious riff on time travel that’s being handled by the prestigious indie banner NEON in the U.S. As part of Collider’s Exclusive Previews series for upcoming winter and television titles, we’re excited to share a new look at the film that highlights the two stars who have seen this project the whole way through and are ready for their next adventure.

Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie sees the fictionalized Matt and Jay still unemployed, still friends, and still trying to get that gig at Toronto’s storied venue, The Rivoli, even though they’ve still never written or recorded a song of their own or even reached out to the locale about playing there. Now older and no wiser than when they started their journey, they take on one of their most dangerous stunts to date — skydiving into the Rogers Centre Stadium — which somehow goes even more horrifically wrong than usual. Before Jay can split off and pursue a solo career in the fallout of their failure, though, Matt turns their RV into a DeLorean-like time machine and sends them back through time to 2008 a la Back to the Future. The scheme forces the duo to find a bottle of Orbitz to get back to their current time before they completely compromise their origins.

In addition to the duo’s typical brand of mockumentary, their feature-length adventure is also packed with archival footage from Nirvanna the Band the Show, some painstaking special effects, and costuming to bring the recent past of Toronto to life. Coming off of directing 2023’s under-the-radar hit BlackBerry, Johnson took the reins for Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie and co-wrote the script with McCarrol to great success on the festival circuit. The film debuted at SXSW and later enjoyed a premiere in its native Canada at the Toronto International Film Festival during the Midnight Madness section, where it earned the People’s Choice Award, an honor previously bestowed upon Coralie Fargeat‘s The Substance and Eric Appel‘s Weird: The Al Yankovic Story. It also holds a perfect 100% score from Rotten Tomatoes and a 9/10 review from Collider’s Nate Richard, who described it as “not only the funniest movie I’ve seen at SXSW, it’s one of the funniest I’ve seen in years.”

‘Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie’ Conducted Some Legal Sorcery for Its Parody

Perhaps the most impressive part of Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie‘s existence is how it somehow didn’t manage to get sued into oblivion for its adherence to the beats of Back to the Future. Johnson and McCarrol went as far as recreating the elements of the DeLorean and including the iconic ’80s time travel film’s signature song, Huey Lewis and the News‘s “The Power of Love.” In an interview with Collider’s Steve Weintraub, they gave a lot of credit to their lawyer, Chris Perez, for helping them navigate the terms of fair use to include everything they wanted without incurring any legal wrath. Moreover, they were adamant about including so much of the DNA of Marty and Doc Brown’s adventure, both because of their love for the film and how well the concept fit with the material they had to work with.

“We wanted to make a Back to the Future movie. We love Back to the Future. We love Robert Zemeckis. It’s obviously a major classic, but we love the beats of it, and we thought it was so suited to what we wanted to do, because we knew we had this Boyhood-style footage of Jay and I for 20 years, and we were like, ‘How can we realistically use this as a story?’ Very quickly, we were like, ‘Why don’t we just do a one-to-one Back to the Future parody?’ That’s what led to all the music being that way, which Jay completely composed himself. It’s what led to us building the time machine like that. That conceit really gave us the entire film.”

Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie premieres on February 13, 2026. Check out our exclusive image above and stay tuned here at Collider for more from our winter preview series throughout the rest of the week.

Release Date

March 9, 2025

Runtime

125 Minutes

Director

Matt Johnson

Writers

Matt Johnson, Jay McCarrol