What defines a “cult film”? Where once the phrase referred to something specific – a movie often with a low-budget, always with a small but devoted audience and bereft of mainstream appeal – now it’s used promiscuously: a modern “cult movie” seems to be any film that people really enjoyed but that doesn’t star Spider-Man. (The moniker was even applied to, say, Everything Everywhere All at Once – which made nearly $150m at the box office and swept the Oscars.) When filmmaker Matt Johnson, however, describes Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie as a “cult movie”, just know: he really does mean it.
The film, out in UK cinemas this week, is a loose followup to a TV series, Nirvanna the Band the Show, itself a niche but adored comedy following two harebrained musicians (Johnson and co-creator Jay McCarrol) and their sisyphean attempts to perform at The Rivoli, a Toronto music venue of only minor renown. The film, though, is a different beast – a madcap, stunt-filled Back to the Future spoof, shot largely Borat-style, safaried amid unwitting members of the public. It’s been a huge hit with most everyone who’s seen it; on the increasingly influential film platform Letterboxd, it ranks as the second highest-rated narrative film of 2026. “For it to all of a sudden get this kind of attention has been quite mindboggling,” Johnson tells me, over Zoom. “Mostly because we’ve been making this exact thing for 20 years.”
