It happens from time to time. A show gets big enough, and runs long enough, to warrant a movie. Such is the case with Impractical Jokers. Brian "Q" Quinn, James "Murr" Murray, Sal Vulcano and Joe Gatto, known as The Tenderloins, are making the jump to the big screen with Impractical Jokers: The Movie, which hits theaters this weekend. But what makes this show worthy of the movie treatment? Why was now the right time?

I recently had the chance to speak with the guys behind the hit truTV comedy series, which has aired eight seasons and is showing no signs of slowing down. We discussed how they came to work with director Chris Henchy, what differentiates Impractical Jokers: The Movie from the show and more.

So I guess the simple question is, after so many episodes and so much time, why the movie? Why now?

Joe Gatto: Well I know what you're thinking, right? Why do I have to get off my couch and go see these four idiots? Spend my hard-earned money, take my family, go into a theater, buy the popcorn, do all this stuff. Why, Ryan? Why? Why would I get up and just go see this?

Sal Vulcano, Brian Quinn and James Murray Tell him why!

Joe Gatto: Sal, tell him why.

Sal Vulcano: We have mortgages, Ryan.

James Murray: No, but tell him also creatively why.

Sal Vulcano: Well, creatively we wanted to fulfill a void in ourselves, which was we wanted to do everything that we were never allowed to do on the show. We made a running list over a decade. We did it all in the movie, and we wanted to provide communal experience for our fans because I think our movie is unique. If I could be serious for a second, Ryan, in the way that people don't always go see a movie, and they all have the same feeling toward the people in it. We've just seen so much love from our fans over the years, and we tour live nationally and internationally, and we see what the energy is like when all these people come together. We thought it would be a really cool experience to give them a viewing experience like that. So we're actually gonna be sneaking around, we're splitting up and going all these states this weekend and surprising people in theaters to watch the movie with them. So it's a long time coming, and we're super excited about it.

Awesome. So for me, digging into this here, you guys got Chris Henchy and he wrote The Other Guys, which is one of my all-time favorite comedies.

James Murray: I just watched it last night!

How did he become the guy in the director's chair for this? How did he get involved?

Joe Gatto: We met with a lot of people, actually, and the partnership in that meeting was just instant. We had a lot of fun with him right away. He got the show. He understood our dynamic.

Sal Vulcano: He clicked with us immediately.

Brian Quinn: We got super drunk that night! Remember that? The first night. It was amazing.

Joe Gatto: Yeah, it's just, when you meet people, especially creative, it needs to be chemistry. And I believe we have that really well with Henchy.

Brian Quinn: We're a tough unit to click into, and Hench? He clicked right in day one. It was great. We had a blast.

Joe Gatto: He also tried to get out of it right after the first meeting. But we couldn't let him.

Brian Quinn: Yeah, that is true. He called his agents and asked to get out of it.

Sal Vulcano: He thought we didn't like him!

boldBrian Quinn: He was right [laughs].

Sal Vulcano: But we've come to love him. You can see, we call him Hench. His name is Chris Henchy. So there's a bond there.

Brian Quinn: We're the henchmen.

Sal Vulcano, James Murray, Joe Gatto: Nice!

Okay, So you guys, now you've done tons and tons of episodes the show. You've got the movie out. Do you guys see an endpoint to this?

Sal Vulcano: No! No. Ryan, no.

Brian Quinn: Who told you that, Ryan?!

{bold|Sal Vulcano: Ryan, they can reanimate my corpse and I'll do laugh-em-ups my whole life.

Joe Gatto: We always said that we would always do this until the day we stopped having fun, and we're still having a blast together.

{bold|Sal Vulcano: As you can tell.

Brian Quinn: We're going to do it until they hate us enough to fire us into the sun just to stop us. Now we love it. We've always said that we're gonna stop it when we don't enjoy it anymore. But the day just has not come,

James Murray: Joe just said those words. He already said it, you just repeated it.

Brian Quinn: I had two strokes.

James Murray: I had five, Get in line [laughs].

Sal Vulcano: We have a conversation before every season now and we just take inventory. Are we having fun? Can we do things? Can we push the envelope still? Can we evolve the show still? Are people still watching? And they are, so right now internally, it just feels right for us to have fun and to move the needle a little bit with this movie, right? It opens this weekend.

James Murray: I will say this. We were able to pull off things in the movie that we've always wanted to do in the TV show, but we couldn't because we only have a half-hour on the TV show, we don't have the budget on the TV show. The movie itself has five, six different punishments throughout.

Brian Quinn: What we'll do is at the beginning of every season we'll take stock of everything and decide we have enough stuff to keep going and whether we want to do it, and then we do it.

Sal Vulcano: I had said that already. I had just said that.

James Murray: You repeated what Joe said, you repeated what Sal said.

Sal Vulcano: Sometimes we lose him. He has a little episode.

Impractical Jokers: The Movie is in theaters now from truTV.