Pizza Movie (2026)

I knew I was going to watch Pizza Movie for one very specific reason: Gaten Matarazzo. As someone who watched Stranger Things, I recognized him immediately, and that was enough to put the movie on my radar. I wasn’t necessarily expecting anything profound, but when a movie is called Pizza Movie, I think the title itself is doing a pretty good job of setting expectations.

And those expectations are basically: turn your brain off, grab some snacks, and enjoy the ride.

The premise is almost aggressively simple. College roommates Jack and Montgomery need to go downstairs to retrieve a pizza delivery. That’s it. Except they’ve taken a mysterious homemade drug that sends them into an increasingly bizarre and hallucinatory experience, and suddenly the two flights of stairs between their dorm room and the lobby might as well be the journey of a lifetime.

If that sounds ridiculous, it absolutely is. I mean that as a compliment.

I couldn’t help but think of Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle while watching this, because it feels like a version of that same basic formula updated for a different generation. Two guys set out on an incredibly simple mission, something goes very wrong, and suddenly they are encountering increasingly absurd people and situations along the way. The stakes are simultaneously nonexistent and somehow extremely important, which is a pretty reliable formula for a stoner comedy.

The biggest difference is that Pizza Movie leans much harder into the surreal. Once Jack and Montgomery take the pills, reality becomes increasingly unreliable, and the movie starts playing around with altered perceptions, strange encounters, and increasingly ridiculous situations. Their quest for pizza becomes less about actually getting the food and more about trying to make sense of whatever the hell is happening to them.

And yes, there is a delivery bot and it was easily my favorite character.

I don’t even need to explain much more than that because I think part of the fun is discovering just how much personality can be squeezed out of a robot whose primary purpose is apparently to deliver pizza. Somehow, this character became one of the funniest parts of the movie for me, and I found myself looking forward to every appearance.

That pretty much sums up the appeal of Pizza Movie. It isn’t trying to be smarter than it is, and it doesn’t seem particularly interested in convincing you that the ridiculousness has some deeper meaning. It commits completely to the premise and keeps escalating. There are moments where you can almost (and literally at one point) see the writers asking themselves, “Okay, but what if we did this?” and then deciding that, yes, obviously, they should.

That approach won’t work for everyone. If absurdist comedy isn’t your thing, I suspect this movie could become exhausting pretty quickly. There are plenty of jokes that are intentionally stupid, plenty of moments that make absolutely no sense, and a healthy amount of drug-fueled chaos. The movie is essentially asking you to meet it at its level, and that level is somewhere between “this is hilarious” and “why am I watching this?”

I was willing to go along for the ride.

Matarazzo is also clearly having fun playing someone very different from Dustin Henderson, which was part of the reason I was interested in seeing him in the first place. His association with Stranger Things is so strong that it’s easy to forget he’s been doing other work outside of the series, and Pizza Movie gives him an opportunity to lean into a much more immature, chaotic kind of comedy. The movie’s cast also includes Sean Giambrone, Lulu Wilson, Peyton Elizabeth Lee, Marcus Scribner, Caleb Hearon, and Sarah Sherman.

The movie is also surprisingly self-aware. It knows exactly what kind of movie it is, and rather than trying to disguise that, it doubles down on it. There isn’t some grand mystery about where this is all going. You know the characters need to get the pizza. You know things are going to get increasingly weird. The entertainment comes from seeing just how far the movie is willing to take that premise before finally getting them there.

That’s why I think comparing it to Harold & Kumar makes sense. Neither movie requires you to believe that the characters are embarking on some heroic quest. They’re just trying to accomplish something incredibly mundane, and the universe seems determined to make that as difficult as humanly possible.

Would I call Pizza Movie a great movie? Probably not.

Would I recommend it if you’re looking for something genuinely funny, completely unserious, and easy to throw on when you don’t want to think too hard? Absolutely.

There are movies that demand your full attention, movies that leave you thinking about them afterward, and movies that you watch because you want to spend an hour and a half laughing at something completely stupid. Pizza Movie falls firmly into that last category, and sometimes that’s exactly what I want.

If you were a fan of the early 2000s stoner comedy era, particularly the Harold & Kumar style of humor, I think there’s a good chance you’ll have fun with this. It feels like a modernized version of that formula, with a younger cast, a much more surreal approach, and, thankfully, a delivery bot that deserves far more recognition than it probably expected to receive.

So, if you’ve been scrolling past Pizza Movie on Hulu wondering whether it’s actually worth watching, consider this your sign.