20 2000s Movies That Could Never Be Made Today

20. Tenacious D in the Pick of Destiny (2006)

Comedy rock duo Tenacious D have been a little more Tenac and ious D in recent years following an ugly public spat over a Trump assassination joke. But 20 years ago, the boys could do no wrong, bringing forth a star-studded stoner comedy in the form of Tenacious D in The Pick of Destiny.

The film tells the fictional story of how Jack Black and Kyle Gass came to form the band, fight the Devil, and write, amongst other things, the best song in the world. Meat Loaf is Black’s father, Dio his guardian angel, and Dave Grohl plays the devil himself, in a rip-roaring 94-minute ode to the plight of the small-time rockstar.

But so much of what makes the film great is tied to the time it was released. This kind of stoner comedy was already a fading genre, only briefly revived by the Judd Apatow set before dying an agonising death in the 2010s. The humour is juvenile, the drug use casual, and the contemporary faux pas many. Certainly, jokes about Gass being r**ed in Hell by the Devil wouldn’t make it into a mainstream New Line Cinema release today. Society and Hollywood have moved on from bong hits, cock push-ups, and Satan's "hot demon gel", even if we haven't.