Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie Finally Makes Toronto the Main Character

Filmmakers Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol on ripping off Back to the Future and making a new, delightfully stupid classic.

by Prabhjot Bains

Published on February 10, 2026

Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol are here to put Toronto on the map. With Nirvanna the Band the Show—a cult web series and, a decade after its premiere, a two-season Spike Jonze-produced TV show— the creative duo played energetic, dimwitted versions of themselves as a musical twosome that found new ways to hilariously fail at securing a gig at the iconic venue: The Rivoli. Each episode relished a gonzo, mockumentary style that boasted bizarre real-world interactions and a flurry of irreverent pop-culture and city-specific references.

Now, with the verbosely titled Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie, Johnson and McCarrol turn their famous schtick up to eleven, cementing a delightfully stupid Toronto classic. Now older, but definitely not wiser, the film sees them travelling back in time (with the help of the short-lived and much-loved beverage, Orbitz), threatening their very origin in a last-ditch attempt to finally land a gig.

Despite how insanely ridiculous and hilarious the movie becomes, Johnson and McCarrol stay committed to championing the city that made them. During the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival, hours before the film’s raucous midnight premiere, the duo reaffirmed their joy in making Toronto the main character for once. “There is a lot of Toronto in this movie, and for audiences to be able to watch Toronto proper, it’s really exciting,” Johnson giddily adds. “People like that this is a comedy about Toronto, and it’s so rare…Toronto doesn’t really get to do anything.”

With cities like Los Angeles, New York, or even the odd American desert town often stealing the spotlight, Nirvanna the Movie feels like an opportunity to set the record straight and let Canada’s metropolis finally command the moving frame. McCarrol notes, “The things that have put Toronto on the map — like Rob Ford, Drake, and the Bautista bat flip — are played to death,” he continues. “What’s fun is making Toronto the main star of this comedy movie on the big screen.”

It’s a sentiment that seeps into every second of the film as they go all in on niche Toronto in-jokes, the most memorable being one that makes a Jian Ghomeshi poster the punchline. Johnson says, “That was a joke that I thought nobody in the world was going to understand, but I was so addicted to it because I was on his show, Q, back in the day, and I was like, we need to put Jian in.” He continues, “That was on the side of the Much Music building for twenty minutes before security came out and ripped it off!”

McCarrol adds, “We had been doing a lot of stuff around that old Much Music building, we were parking illegally, shooting illegally, playing in and out of the lines, but for some reason the Jian Ghomeshi poster got us banned and into trouble.” Johnson joyfully chimes in, “It’s a joke very important to me and in Austin at SXSW, people laughed and I’m convinced they have no idea what they were laughing at…it’s such a funny moment and people in Toronto are going to go crazy!”

In true patriotic fashion, the conversation funneled into a nostalgic, non-sequitur about a bygone Toronto. “I remember when they were taking Jian’s poster down at the CBC building, it used to be one of the pillars—because he basically was the CBC,” Johnson says, “and they had to scrape it off and you could see Jian’s half-smudged, smiling face, and I was like Oh my god!” While that specific moment didn’t find its way into the final cut, such era-specific oddities ooze into every second of the film, as it unfolds more as a highly specific document of Toronto’s culture than of the city’s recent history.

Taking place in 2008, the film abounds in iconic, recognizable late-aughts iconography, but the setting was less of a precise creative choice and more of a practical consideration. “We were kids making the web series during that time and so the footage we had of us at the time was from that year, specifically from 2006-2009,” Johnson continues “So we had to pick one day that fit, and we started looking at all the cultural markers we could find and it became a function of when we filmed ourselves as kids.”

Though as much as the film is Toronto-coded, it owes as much of its time-travelling fabric to Back to the Future, boasting dialogue and plot points yanked straight from Robert Zemeckis’s 1985 classic—including their own take on a Flux Capacitor. “Originally it was a road trip movie, and I wanted to include some sci-fi element to get a Bill & Ted thing going… McCarrol continues “and then when it wasn’t coming together, we, as a joke, wrote it as a time travel movie and it came together so quickly.” He continues “we never re-wrote it from there, and we always re-write when we shoot but we came up with it in a couple days, and it stuck.”

As a result of the time-travel motif, the film rides a precarious line between evoking Zemeckis’ film and ripping it off. Yet, Johnson didn’t bother thinking in those terms, instead for him “the more he could rip it off the better.” He notes “We shot a whole scene in Graffiti Alley where Jay and I do, verbatim, a dialogue exchange that Doc and Marty have—we didn’t care.” McCarrol interrupts “Back to the Future can only get you so far, but once you’re dealing with the narrative, you can’t just lean on it, you need to be malleable and original.”

His assertion couldn’t be more felt in a film that goes in some insane directions, finding comedic gold in a libertarian Canadian Tire employee one minute, and making the CN tour the centre of an outrageous action set piece the next. Yet, despite its madcap plot, the film maintains a cogent, emotionally earnest throughline. “That was the most difficult part,” McCarrol notes “it’s the statue we were constantly chipping away at, so we had to start cutting jokes that threatened the central emotional delivery.”

It’s a miracle then that Nirvanna the Movie survives as one of the most emotionally satisfying comedies in recent memory, one that is not only an honest, authentic, and emotional ode to Toronto but also the scrappy, DIY escapades that brought them to this moment. Now, looking at each other with fulfilled smirks, McCarrol notes, “When we watch it back, I can’t believe we figured it out.”

Nirvana the Band the Show the Movie Releases February 13th, 2026.