Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass ending explained: does Gail even the score with Jon Hamm?

Here is the premise, and I need you to sit with it: Gail Daughtry (Zoey Deutch), a hairdresser from Kansas, and her fiancé Tom draw up a "celebrity sex pass" before their wedding — the classic hypothetical where each partner names the one famous person they're allowed to sleep with, consequence-free, in the astronomically unlikely event the opportunity arises.

Then Tom's opportunity arises. It's Jennifer Aniston. He takes it.

What follows in David Wain and Ken Marino's gleefully unhinged comedy is the only rational response: Gail packs a bag, heads to Los Angeles, and sets out to invoke her side of the contract with her designated celebrity — Jon Hamm, playing himself, magnificently.

The Wizard of Oz, but make it filthy

The movie is a full Oz homage and doesn't care who notices: a girl from Kansas in red slippers, a dog-adjacent companion literally named Otto, a road trip full of strays who each need something, and at the end of the yellow brick road — not a wizard, but Jon Hamm, an equally mythical figure no ordinary person can actually reach. The whole thing runs on that logic, which tracks, given how Wain and Marino describe their writing process:

"We write all those different themes and ideas, and we put them on pieces of paper. We throw them in a little bowl and pull out the first three."

Wain admits the pitch was a hard sell — "we pitched it to plenty of places that said no" — to which Deutch, a professional, offered: "Maybe you did a bad job pitching." As for Aniston, who gamely plays the woman who detonates the marriage before it starts, Deutch reports: "She has a thing. Every take was so f***ing funny, and she's such a lovely person."

So. Does she even the score?

Spoiler-phobes, this is your exit. Everyone else:

Yes. Emphatically. After a detour involving a swapped briefcase, two criminals, a crime boss named Ludovica (Sabrina Impacciatore, having a blast), and a fake movie pitch engineered purely to get into a room with Hamm, Gail does the one thing nobody else in his orbit does — she tells him the truth. The whole ridiculous story. Hamm is so charmed he helps the group out, and then, yes: Gail and Jon Hamm have wildly enthusiastic sex, and the movie makes a point of the fact that she has a great time. Contract executed. Score: even.

A 92 test screening score kept the Mr. Irrelevant movie on a Christmas release date — one week after Doomsday

But the actual ending is better than the math:

• Gail does not go home and marry Tom — she realizes the pass was never the problem, the fiancé was;
• Tom stays in Kansas with his consequence-free conscience and no bride;
• Hamm shows up in a hot air balloon — because Oz — and whisks Gail off into a strictly casual arrangement while she finally sees the world.

She came to Los Angeles to get even. She left with the better end of the deal, the better story, and the better man — on a no-strings basis, at her discretion, via balloon. That's not evening the score. That's running up it.

Tom, if you're out there: she's ridin' in a balloon, babe. You get the house in Kansas.

Previously we wrote: Caitriona Balfe's Sense and Sensibility 2026 movie release: US date October 16, and the Outlander star plays the mother