Watch Tenacious D in: The Pick of Destiny Online

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As a young man, Jack Black leaves his religious family and oppressive Midwestern town for Hollywood on a quest to form the world's most awesome rock band. There he meets acoustic guitarist Kyle Gass, who is performing on the street, and begins worshipping him as a rock god because of his skills and attitude. Kyle feeds Jack's fantasy by pretending to be famous with a self-named band ("The Kyle Gass Project"), and exploits him to do work such as cleaning his appartment and buying him weed. (Under the promise that Jack can audition for his fictitious band.) After Jack learns Kyle is actually unemployed and living off his parents, the two become equal, and Kyle apologizes to Jack by giving him a brand-new guitar. They create their own band: Tenacious D, named for birthmarks on found on their behinds. (Jack has a birthmark which says: "Tenac", and Kyle has a mark which reads: "ious D".)

Soon Jack and Kyle learn the deepest secret of rock: all the rock legends used the same guitar pick, The Pick of Destiny, which has "supranatural" powers. It was created by a dark wizard from a piece of Satan's tooth, as a gift to a blacksmith who saved his life from the great demon. The pick gives its holder unnatural abilities with stringed instruments. Infatuated by the prospect of becoming the next great rock star, Jack immediately sets Tenacious D on a quest to steal the Pick of Destiny from a rock history museum. Along the way, the band briefly splits up, when Kyle decides that sex comes first in "sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll", while Jack wants to stick to the mission at hand.

But soon, Jack and Kyle come back together when they realize they need each other as friends. The two manage to steal the Pick of Destiny due to incompetent security at the rock museum. Armed with this supernatural pick, they plan to use the winnings from a local bar's talent contest to pay their rent, but before they can go on stage, greed overcomes them, and they fight over the pick, snapping it in half accidentally. After a pep-talk from the bar's owner, they decide they are good enough to go onto the contest without the pick, not knowing that the owner is Satan in human form, looking for his missing tooth piece. Coming back outside (deciding they can both use half of the pick), they are confronted by Satan, who is "made whole" when he places the Pick of Destiny back on his broken tooth, giving him the ability to use his supernatural powers on Earth. He threatens to take Tenacious D back to Hell.

To save their lives, Tenacious D challenge Satan to a "rock-off", which he cannot deny, as the "demon code" strictly forbids him from declining such a challenge. As the bargain goes, if Tenacious D wins, Satan must return to hell and pay their rent. But if Satan wins, he gets to take Kyle back with him! Ultimately, they lose (Kyle sings, "That was a masterpiece! / He rocks too hard because he's not a mortal man."), and Satan attempts to shoot Kyle with a bolt of energy. Jack jumps in the way, and the bolt bounces off his guitar, blowing off a piece of Satan's horn. Jack is able to send him back to Hell with a magical incantation. (As explained earlier, should Satan become "incomplete", he can be banished from the Earth.)

The two turn Satan's horn into the "Bong of Destiny" and the movie closes with the two smoking from it as they write new songs.

The film performed poorly at the box office, only grossing a total of $8.2 million in the United States. It debuted with a mere $3 million during its opening weekend at number eleven. With a budget of $20,000,000 the film is considered a financial failure because it was not able to gross half the cost of production. In the fifth week after its release, the movie only earned $50,000 and virtually vanished from theaters. DVD sales outnumbered the box office receipts, totaling over $9 million. Prior to filming, Black and Gass each received $5,000.000 and were to share 10% of the total revenue of the film. This means that each of them earned about $865,000 from the project. This movie is rated R for pervasive language, sexual content, and drug usage.

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