It’s been a good and long wait for the population to feast its eyes on the film now known as Twilight of the Mallrats; formerly known as Mallbrats and Mallrats 2. Writer/director Kevin Smith is pretty confident that the movie will not only start shooting at the end of this year, but also that the film will be worth the time it’s taken to get to this point. Which is good, because an entirely different Mallrats 2 almost happened, and if this original concept took flight, it would have been a bit of a Die Hard ripoff.
Recently Focus Features ran a livestream of Kevin Smith’s original Mallrats, with the man himself in the chatroom to lay down some prime knowledge of his ‘90s classic. In the mood to talk up where he was at the time of the first film, and where Twilight of the Mallrats is looking to bring him, Kevin Smith described about the original Mallrats 2 he’d written for the screen as follows:
That sequel was very antic. Very heightened-reality. It was “Die Hard in a Mall,” with terrorists taking over and Brodie having to save the day. So now, Twilight of the Mallrats better resembles Mallrats.
The world of Die Hard clones is a wide and vast reaching one, with movies like Under Siege, Executive Decision, and Air Force One all making their names on aping the style that director John McTiernan and star Bruce Willis would set the standard for back in 1988. Among several other reasons that are probably lingering out there, Kevin Smith wants no part of that sort of racket, as Mallrats is an irreverent comedy about relationships and ruining chocolate covered pretzels.
It certainly hasn’t been an easy road for Mallrats 2 to become a reality, as the film has gone through changes like converting its cinematic narrative into a defunct TV series, and even some turbulence pertaining to the rights of the project belonging to a non-interested studio. But like any good filmmaker, Kevin Smith's tenacity has kept him going, and in turn has made Twilight of the Mallrats a consistent matter of interest.
Hard at work on Twilight of the Mallrats since the beginning of the year, Kevin Smith has been using his time in isolation wisely by tightening up the seals on this new sequel, as well as the script for another long awaited follow-up, Clerks III. And based on the facts he’s been spilling to the public, the work he’s putting in has a lot of questions to answers fans of Mallrats have been asking for decades.
It wasn’t a total waste though, as Mallrats 2’s original concept did eventually find itself serving a purpose, as heard in further remarks Kevin Smith had made earlier in the chat:
The first sequel to Mallrats that I wrote, Mallrats 2, wound up fueling my last flick, Jay & Silent Bob Reboot.
If you’re one of the many fans that loved Jay & Silent Bob Reboot’s fantastic debut in 2019, then you have Mallrats 2 to thank, on top of Smith’s near fatal heart attack. Given the metaphorical options, it’s probably safer to thank the script to Mallrats 2.
Twilight of the Mallrats hopes to be in production by the end of the year, so when we’ll be seeing that film is a bit up in the air. However, if you want to see Jay & Silent Bob Reboot, the film is currently streaming through the Prime Video subscription service.
