Kevin Smith recently announced that shooting on Clerks III will begin in May. It’s a movie that might not have come to fruition at all, were it not for the movie Tusk.
Granted, Tusk is a movie that is not for mainstream audiences and seems to know no gray area – either people love it or hate it. Well, obviously somebody loved it enough, as during Episode #183 of his podcast, Hollywood Babble-On , Smith discusses how Tusk helped him “fail upwards” into being able to make Clerks III.
“Everything in my life would suck right now if I hadn’t made that movie. I’m back in movies now. I’ve got three lined up, and this is the f***ing grand news. Tusk was the absolute bridge to Clerks III. Because of Tusk, I got my financing for Clerks III… So everybody that’s like, ‘He failed, he failed,’ thank you I failed into Clerks III.”
Smith took to Twitter to divulge when Clerks III will begin shooting, as well as to tell what the two projects to follow will be. He also left something of a hint about a potential project, that could have fans of his Jersey based tales of debauchery, drooling.
We shoot CLERKS III in May. HIT SOMEBODY shoots September to Christmas. Then in Feb 2016, we do MOOSE JAWS. But after that? I smell a rat…
— KevinSmith (@ThatKevinSmith) March 12, 2015
Could this future project be a Mallrats sequel? During an interview with Schmonty at Tuscon’s, KFMA Rock 102 , Smith confirmed that’s exactly what he was hinting at. Smith explained the motivation behind doing a sequel to Mallrats, after a span of 20 years.
“It kind of… came out of nowhere. Lately I’ve been doing this thing where I’m like ‘Well, do you want to do what’s good for your career or do you just want to have fun?’…and so nobody’s clamoring for a ‘Mall Rats’ sequel, but I would love to make one. It’s been like 20 years and I had a cool idea and bunch of investors that are like, ‘do it!’ so here we are man, kind of neat.”
With American shopping malls becoming something of a dying breed, it will be very interesting to see exactly how this movie’s plot will relate to these diminishing monuments to consumerism.