Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie The Interview

If you play and are a fan of video games, you probably know Matt Johnson from his viral video, Wii Shop Channel Update Day. In it, he and his creative partner, Jay McCarrol, celebrate the release of new Wii Shop titles with an elaborate song set to the “danceable” Wii Shop Channel main theme. “I think 95% of people who’d ever even heard of us is explicitly from that,” Johnson tells me on a phone call.

It has become a calling card of sorts for Johnson, but he is also an accomplished director with 2023’s excellent BlackBerry and 2026’s Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie, which is an extension of McCarrol and his characters that appeared in the Update Day short, which then became a web series, then a television show, and is now a movie.

None of Johnson’s movies to date are about video games or based on video games (though, tangentially, he will be directing a Magic: The Gathering movie soon), but there are undeniable ties to the medium in all his films. In fact, Nirvanna The Movie begins and ends with overt Chrono Trigger references.