Jackass 3.5 Headed To Theaters?

Jackass 3-D rocked box office expectations this past weekend by nearly equaling the total grosses of each of the past two Jackass films within three days of its release, and in typical Hollywood fashion, Paramount is looking at other means to capitalize on their investment. Jackass figurehead Johnny Knoxville already announced plans of a Jackass 3.5 release, which was set to hit the web and DVD a month or so after Jackass 3-D's theatrical run, but now it looks as though Paramount wants to take the left-over footage from the gang's 3-D outing and repackage it for a theatrical release all its own.

It isn't a sure thing yet, but 24 Frames says Paramount is considering what to do with all of the material that didn't make it into the film, and that a second theatrical release is high on their list of options.

Here's what Knoxville had to say on the matter:

We shot two movies' worth of footage. We have so many bits that we never even turned in to Paramount because we were so swamped with ideas — funny stuff. The bits were just coming out of us left and right.

This isn't the first time Knoxville has said this either. He made similar claims to MTV prior to Jackass 3-D's release, saying of the footage, "That'll be in '[Jackass] 3.5,' coming out at Christmas."

Other members of the Jackass crew have also talked up the follow-up film, which at the time was intended to have a release similar to that of the direct-to-video effort Jackass 2.5 (featuring footage that failed to make it into Jackass Number Two). In an interview with ScreenCrave, Jason "Wee-Man" Acuna said, "3. 5 is going to be amazing on its own too," while Ryan Dunn explained, "We literally have enough footage for an entirely other movie. That was the hardest part of making this movie, it was cutting out the good stuff to fit it into an hour and a half."

Part of this footage includes a deleted segment with the man referred to in the film as Will the Farter (for reasons that are self-explanatory) using a blowgun to launch darts at a target on Steve-O's face. Steve-O's response: "How are you going to leave out the scene where a guy farts darts into another guy's face? You know you're working with some high-quality material if you're leaving something like that out."

After finding little redeeming in Jackass 2.5, which contained a surplus of gross-out footage but little in the way of exciting and/or hilarious stunts, I'm not sure how to feel about this news. In all likelihood, the material that didn't make it into Jackass 3-D was pushed aside for a reason. On the other hand, the majority of Jackass 3-D seemed to be envisioned and executed with 3D in mind, so a 3D theatrical release might better serve the original intent of the excised gags. But to charge the full ticket price, plus the 3D surcharge, for footage that wasn't good enough to make it into the actual film? I don't think so, Paramount.