by Jason Snyder

‘FoolTube’: Jackass to launch user video site

news
Dec 13, 20073 mins

Smack in the middle of a strike over digital intellectual property rights, one Hollywood studio is taking a two-footed approach to kicking striking writers in the crotch, as Paramount Pictures will debut Jackass 2.5 online, the first online premiere of a studio feature film, according to a report in today’s New York Times.

Reality TV and the Web — two ongoing sore points for scriptwriters these days, here, rolled up into one.

The famed LCD (least common denominator) franchise — built in the main on filming the largely unthinkable — will take its hour-long masochistic filth fest to the Web beginning Dec. 19 via Blockbuster’s Movielink.

“There’s more vomiting, nudity and defection,” an anonymous executive told the Times, proving once again that standards-bearing quality content is fast finding its first home on the Web.

[For the record,the release date for Jackass 2.5, an unscripted, non-WGA film, was set prior to the writer’s strike, according to a company representative.]

But the opportunity to watch Johnny Knoxville and Co. explore the boundaries of the body’s ability to withstand creatively induced pain is only the first stage of this potential Web phenom rocket.

Not deaf to the clamor for community, MTV will launch jackassworld.com [Not an IDG affiliate. –Ed.], a site devoted to your idiocratic 2.0 needs, including blogs, archived content, and — you guessed it — user-generated video.

That’s right, you will no longer have to troll through “in-the-nuts” YouTube meta tags to fulfill your at-work cringing fix.

And whereas Netflix continues to pursue Web 2.0-minded approaches to increasing its online DVD rental lead, tapping crowdsourcing to improve its peer-based recommendation engine, Blockbuster is parrying here with an old-guard favorite: exclusive rights to air Jackass 2.5 online for a week, thanks to corporate-to-corporate dealings between it and Paramount.

And for those of you who don’t get that Sun Microsystems Project Sun Spot Development Kit sensor and robotics kit off InfoWorld’s “Must-have gadgets for the discerning geek” gift list, Jackass 2.5 will be available for download ownage on Dec. 26 via iTunes and Amazon.com, according to the Times.

We may have to wait impatiently for the continuations of Battlestar Galactica and The Office, but in the meantime, at least we know those Hollywood bigwigs have an eye on “[opening] up and [changing] the game about additional content studios can create,” as Paramount Pictures Digital Entertainment President Thomas Lesinski told the Times.

And that, of course, is a potential cash cow for them, based on your interest in taking a server blade to the crotch.

What sort of IT-related jackassworld.com contributions do you anticipate seeing?