Nick Kocher and Brian McElhaney

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The title only endeared itself to Kocher and McElhaney when they wrote a joke about it that pays off in the most unexpected way. I won’t give the game away here, but they do get into the weeds of it during the subsequent Q&A.

“We had all these polls we’d send out to our friends, and there was no unanimous title idea that everyone loved,” McElhaney tells The Hollywood Reporter. “I remember shouting, ‘We cannot call this Pizza Movie! That is the worst title in the world.’ And I still do feel that way. But then we added the joke in the movie. Now I deeply love it because it is all the setup for this punchline 83 minutes into the movie,” Kocher adds.

Pizza Movie chronicles the hallucinatory misadventures of Jack (Matarazzo), Montgomery (Sean Giambrone) and Lizzy (Lulu Wilson), as they journey to the lobby of their college dormitory in order to eat a pizza that will alleviate the effects of an experimental drug they all ingested. The film is a Hulu release, continuing the rather unfortunate trend of comedy no longer being the box office powerhouse it once was. BriTANick knew they were making a streaming release from the start, but they did broach the theatrical subject to no avail.

The collaborators then decided to poke fun at the lack of a theatrical release by taking a page out of Timothée Chalamet’s Marty Supreme playbook. Instead of the Las Vegas Sphere, they had Matarazzo and Giambrone stand atop a random picnic table to explain that their wish for a big-screen release was rejected. Kocher and McElhaney credit Hulu for having a sense of humor about it all.

“Hulu was totally down for it. They knew that we wanted it to be in theaters; we’d had the conversation before,” McElhaney explains. “Hulu has been really cool the whole time about us making fun of the things we want to make fun of and making the movie we wanted to make. So we knocked that spot out in an hour while we were in between press during South by Southwest.”

Kocher believes that one of the contributing factors to comedy’s box office decline is the fact that the genre has become so prevalent across social media. And given that the duo were at the forefront of internet comedy via their BriTANick YouTube channel and various other comedic web sites, they know they’ve contributed to the genre’s current predicament.

“We’re complaining about the thing that we began,” McElhaney says. “It’s a double-edged sword. It’s an undeniably good thing to remove a lot of the gatekeepers so it’s much easier for young people to break into the industry. But it has also created a ton of noise and distraction,” Kocher adds.

Fortunately, the duo does have a theatrical release coming out this month. They wrote Jorma Taccone’s Over Your Dead Body, starring Samara Weaving and Jason Segal. Dated for April 24, the pic is a remake of Tommy Wirkola’s Norwegian dark comedy-thriller, The Trip (2021), and the experience was a dream come true for the long-time admirers of Taccone’s own sketch comedy trio, The Lonely Island. The latter group left SNL four years before BriTANick arrived.

“When we first met, [Taccone] didn’t know that we had written for SNL, and I was like, ‘We actually wrote for SNL.’ He then gave me a huge hug — the hug of war veterans who’ve been in the battle trenches together,” Kocher recalls. “So he’s been such an influence

Pizza Movie's Surprising Homage to Chalamet for Hulu Movie