Name: Idiots
Director: Macon Blair
Genre: Comedy, Crime
Released: 2026-08-28T00:00:00+00:00
Duration: 100 min
Cast: Dave Franco, O'Shea Jackson Jr., Mason Thames, Kiernan Shipka, Nicholas Braun

Two men who should never have been handed responsibility get one clear instruction: deliver a wealthy teenager to a rehab facility and collect the fee. That is the entire assignment. It is also exactly the kind of assignment that has powered a century of comedies about incompetence, the errand that looks like easy money right up until the first thing goes wrong. Macon Blair’s Idiots plants itself squarely in that tradition, then starts pulling up the floorboards one by one.

The premise is deceptively modest. A transport job, a destination, a payout. What Blair keeps circling is the distance between how simple the plan sounds and how catastrophically unequipped its two executors are to carry it out. Screwball mined that distance, the stoner era mined it, the buddy crime picture has been mining it for decades, and it still rewards a filmmaker willing to let his leads be genuinely, unredeemably foolish rather than secretly competent. The title is not being ironic.

The casting tells you what the film wants to be. Dave Franco, most watchable when he plays men slightly out of their depth, takes one half of the pair. O’Shea Jackson Jr., who can fold bluster and panic into the same breath, takes the other. Between them they carry the central wager, that a comedy can be built entirely on two people you would never hire and that their failure becomes the pleasure rather than the problem. Mason Thames plays the teenager they are meant to deliver, less a passenger than a third unstable element rattling around the car.

Blair arrives at broad comedy with an unusual pedigree. He built his name acting in the lean, violent chamber pieces of Jeremy Saulnier, the kind of films where a botched plan ends in real blood, before directing a debut that took the top prize at Sundance and read as a small, furious fable about an ordinary person shoved past her breaking point. Idiots keeps that pushed-past-the-limit engine and swaps the melancholy for volume. The lineage is easy to feel. This is the crime-comedy key in which the mechanics of a scheme falling apart are also the mechanics of the joke, the tradition of the Coens’ fools fleeing their own bad decisions and the road pictures that lock mismatched men into one vehicle and let proximity do the damage. Blair is writing inside that tradition rather than translating it from a distance.

What keeps Idiots from settling into a pure hangout comedy is the crime it keeps brushing up against. The straightforward gig, in the film’s own words, spirals into dangerous mayhem, and Blair’s history suggests he means the danger, that the violence will be allowed to cost something even in a film cheerful enough to give a character a name you cannot print. That friction, between a comic register daring you to take nothing seriously and a plot that keeps ratcheting the stakes, is the film’s real subject. Peter Dinklage and Kiernan Shipka surface in the surrounding chaos. Nicholas Braun turns up under a character name that works as its own punchline.

There is a whole shelf of American comedy this sits beside, the pictures about small-time operators who mistake a job for a windfall, from the sunbaked misadventures of the road era to the more recent run of stoned, profane buddy films where the danger and the laughs share the same nerve. What separates the good ones is rarely the premise, which is nearly always the same, and almost always the specificity, whether the fools feel like particular people rather than comic functions. Blair’s earlier work suggests an eye for exactly that, for the texture of ordinary desperation, which is the quality most likely to keep Idiots from collapsing into noise.

None of that guarantees the film clears the bar its own premise sets. Broad comedies about likable screwups are among the easiest things to start and the hardest to land, and a road picture is only ever as good as its detours. The template goes slack the instant the escalation feels arbitrary instead of earned. Blair’s debut worked in a miniature register, one neighborhood and one contained rage, and whether that control survives the jump to an ensemble, a wider canvas and a cast happy to trade on stunt appearances is a fair open question. Retitling the project from something unprintable to the flat, blunt Idiots may sand the provocation down or may simply move it somewhere else. The trailer sells energy. Energy is not yet shape.

Dave Franco in the Macon Blair comedy Idiots 2026 — Dave Franco in *Idiots* (2026)

The ensemble runs deeper than its two leads. Franco and Jackson anchor the pair at the center, with Thames as the teenager in their custody and Kiernan Shipka, Nicholas Braun and Peter Dinklage filling out the mayhem around them. Blair writes and directs, his first original feature since that debut, and Rough House Pictures, the Danny McBride and David Gordon Green company whose raucous comic sensibility is stamped across the material, sits among the producers. The film premiered at Sundance and carried on through SXSW and the Atlanta Film Festival ahead of its theatrical run.

IFC opens Idiots in US theaters on August 28, 2026. It runs 100 minutes. No Mexican or other international theatrical dates have been confirmed at the time of writing.