It looks like we’ll have a little longer to wait before we catch up with Dante, Randall and the rest of the View Askewniverse. During a Reddit AMA yesterday, filmmaker Kevin Smith has revealed that he’s decided to put Clerks III on hold in order to focus on his recently announced holiday horror anthology Comes the Krampus. Here’s what Smith had to say about the subject.
Last year, I turned a podcast into the best movie I’ve ever made. We call it TUSK. This was fun and crazy creative. But more importantly? It had the benefit of never having been tried before: the first movie based on a podcast. Shit like that tickles the shit out of me: I like being first through the door. It was bold, in a not-really-bold-compared-to-folks-who-serve-in-the-armed-forces kinda way. It was me taking nearly 7 years of podcasting and saying “Hey – some of these might actually work as movies…”
So now that TUSK is nearly done (we still have our Guy Lapointe scenes to shoot this month), the idea was to gear up for CLERKS III. But then I started thinking “Isn’t that stepping backwards? Like literally?” While I love it with all of my heart, CLERKS is my past. It’s how I got started. And I’m just getting started again, after taking 3 years off, certain I was done making movies. TUSK represents something bold and new. No matter how bold I make it, CLERKS III will always have a number in the title. It will never be new. It will rock, I assure you, and it will be a worthy final installment in my mini-mart magnum opus. But it’s predicated on something I did a long time ago. I wanna keep moving forward. SModcast Pictures is becoming exactly that: we’re starting to make movies based on podcasts. TUSK was the first, and now COMES THE KRAMPUS will be next.
Now, at this point in time, nobody but me can make a CLERKS film. But ANYONE can make a Krampus picture. So before anyone else does, I figured it’s time to keep moving forward: we’re gonna shoot COMES THE KRAMPUS in April, before CLERKS III.
We’ve got a 20 day schedule and an under-3 million budget, and lots of folks returning from TUSK as well as other flicks I’ve done. Gonna be a SModCo CREEPSHOW, set at Christmas. And if we stay on schedule, by the time we start, it will have been only 4 months since the initial conversational whimsy about it on the EDUMACATION podcast, right before Christmas. That’s a real fuel to my fire now: taking weird ideas from podcast to film as quickly as possible, before anyone realizes they’re dumb ideas and they have time to fall apart.
CLERKS III is still coming. I love the script so much, I’ll make it happen, I promise. But the muse (and the Mewes) is pulling me away from something old for the moment and pulling me toward something new. And when the muse whispers, I listen. When the Mewes whispers, it’s just kinda creepy. And he spells shit wrong – even though he’s just whispering and not writing.
Wise move by Smith, or would you have preferred to see Clerks III as his next project? Let us know in the comments below…
Originally published February 7, 2014. Updated April 11, 2018.
