Following his return to the View Askewniverse in 2019 with Jay and Silent Bob Reboot, Kevin Smith has once again returned to his filmmaking roots with Clerks III. While Smith has talked about the threequel since Clerks II came out in 2006, Smith ended up overhauling the story a few years back, with the movie now being inspired by the heart attack he suffered in 2018. However, it turns out that this is the reason that Smith’s wife and daughter, Jennifer Schwalbach Smith and Harley Quinn Smith, have mixed feelings about Clerks III.
As seen in the Clerks III trailer that premiered earlier this month, the movie follows Jeff Anderson’s Randal Graves suffering his own heart attack and then deciding to make a movie about his and Brian O’Halloran’s Dante Hick’s lives working at the Quick Stop. It’s a meta twist on how Smith’s own filmmaking career started back in the mid-1990s, but he explained to EW that his wife and daughter were not into him mining comedy out of a horrible moment in their lives. In his words:
My wife and kid don't enjoy the movie the way I do, at least the first half hour. My wife's like, 'Look, what you think is funny now was the worst moment of our fucking lives.' And I was like, 'Well, don't say that to the critics, for Christ's sakes! It's too easy a lay-up for them!'
It’s understandable where Jennifer Schwalbach Smith and Harley Quinn Smith are coming from considering that Kevin Smith nearly died from his heart attack. Clerks III isn’t spending the entirety of its runtime watching Randal recover from his heart attack, but this was a traumatic moment for the women. As Smith joked though, he’d rather his wife and daughter not keep bringing that up for fear that reviewers might use that as material when sharing their thoughts on Clerks III. That said, once the focus gets taken off of Randal’s heart attack, it sounds like Jennifer and Harley are more on board with what the movie has to offer.
In addition to Brian O’Halloran and Jeff Anderson being joined by Jason Mewes and Kevin Smith reprising Jay and Silent Bob, Clerks III will feature familiar faces like Rosario Dawson, Trevor Fehrman, Marilyn Ghigliotti and Ben Affleck. Lionsgate acquired the threequel’s production and distribution rights in July 2021, and filming happened in Red Bank, New Jersey through the entirety of the following August. If you missed out on the Clerks III trailer, feel free to watch it below:
Clerks III will first be released exclusively in theaters on September 13 and 15 through Fathom Events and then it will be shown in various cities across the United States via the Kevin Smith-hosted Clerks III: The Convenience Tour. Look through our 2022 release schedule to see what other movies are left to come out this year.
