For many of us, some movies represent key moments or periods in our lives. Maybe you saw a film on a night when something significant in your life happened. Maybe there was a movie or a group of movies that you saw with friends that always make you think about them. For me, the early movies of Kevin Smith will always make me think about college, and man, it just hit me college was a long ass time ago, because Mallrats is old as hell.
Kevin Smith recently had a mini-Mallrats reunion at a fan convention where he appeared with hetero-lifemate Jason Mewes alongside Brodie Bruce himself, Jason Lee. In the post on Instagram, Smith mentions that Mallrats is on the verge of turning 30 years old, which is insane and can’t be possibly be right because I can’t possibly be that old.
And yet, it’s true. Mallrats was released in 1995 which means 2025 will mark its 30th anniversary. It came out a year after Smith’s directorial debut with the indie darling Clerks. Mallrats was a huge opportunity for Smith to work with a major studio, one that he absolutely failed at because Mallrats bombed horribly in theaters.
However, it would become something of a cult classic by being discovered later on VHS by people like me and my friends in the dorms during my freshman year of college. That was the year that I first saw both Clerks and Mallrats. We rented those movies multiple times over the course of that year and after.
It’s not a stretch to say those movies, and Chasing Amy, which followed soon after, are the reasons I became obsessed with film and am writing about movies professionally today. A friend of mine even wrote a screenplay about that was about our freshman year of college, clearly inspired by Smith. It was god-awful, but it made us laugh.
But somehow, it’s been nearly three decades since I was in college. That doesn’t seem quite right, I can’t possibly be that old. Except, yeah, no, I’m actually that old. I’m old enough that two years ago I went to see Kevin Smith as part of his tour for Clerks III. I saw it with one of the college friends I made back then, as we both remembered an era that is much farther in the rearview mirror than it seemed at the time.
One thing that Smith doesn’t mention in the post is if we might ever see a Mallrats 2. The director has talked about wanting to make the film on more than one occasion, and there is a Mallrats 2 script in existence according to him. At one point it looked like Mallrats 2 was happening, and then Smith had this minor potentially fatal heart attack. He ended up shifting gears and making Clerks III, a movie inspired by the heart attack instead.
It's unclear what the current state of Mallrats 2, tentatively known as Twilight of the Mallrats actually is. The movie may still happen, though exactly when is anybody's guess.
