The most devastating moment of Jack Black’s career: “It was a body blow”
Over the past few months, it has been impossible to avoid Jack Black following his performance in one of 2025’s most inescapable films, The Minecraft Movie, where he brought the character of Steve to life much to the excitement of crazed fans, who snuck chickens into cinemas and threw popcorn like it was confetti.
Since the start of the 2000s, Black has been a stalwart feature of Hollywood, known for playing comic and slightly eccentric characters in everything from School of Rock to Tropic Thunder and Goosebumps. The actor certainly isn’t for everyone, often exerting a rather obnoxious sensibility and hardly showing himself to have much range, but he remains a popular figure regardless, beloved by many for standing outside of the mould of a conventional Hollywood star.
Before Black was a successful actor – breaking through with his supporting role in Stephen Frears’ High Fidelity – he almost pursued music as his main artistic endeavour, having formed Tenacious D in 1994. Alongside his friend Kyle Gass, Black crafted a unique form of comedy rock music that eventually landed the pair an HBO series in 1997.
The success of the show soon turned into a creeping sense of doubt. Black didn’t know which path to journey down – music or film? Luckily, he soon found a way to balance both, and the band have since released four albums and even won a coveted Grammy Award. It was only fitting, then, that Black inevitably combined Tenacious D and acting, resulting in the film Tenacious D in: The Pick of Destiny, which he co-wrote with Gass and director Liam Lynch.
The film sees the pair play fictional versions of themselves, their characters known as JB and KG, as they set out in search of Satan, played by Dave Grohl, to find a guitar pick that will allow them to become the world’s greatest musicians. Despite the passion that Black channelled into writing and starring in the film, it was a flop, which left him feeling devastated.
Why The Pick of Destiny nearly ended Jack Black’s screenwriting career
Talking to Maxim, Black revealed that he’d been excited to sink his teeth into screenwriting, but he was soon faced with the fact that maybe it wasn’t for him. “It was a body blow, mainly because we had so much fun making it. I got a let out of the writing. I was psyched to write more screenplays, but that kind of killed my writing career.”
Sadly for Black, the movie only grossed $13.9million against a budget of $20m, leaving Tenacious D in: The Pick of Destiny far from one of his finest efforts. The band found more success with the movie’s album of the same name, however, with the half-hour-long record making its way to number eight on the Billboard 200 charts.
Black has since admitted that he was disappointed that the movie failed to find success when it was released, telling GQ, “We went on SNL, we did everything you could do, and then the movie came out and nobody went to see it, and we were devastated. But we were still proud of the movie, you know?”
