We might as well classify this week as Clerks Week. On Monday, it was announced that Lionsgate had picked up Kevin Smith’s next movie, Clerks 3, which will begin shooting in New Jersey next month. Then Wednesday marked 15 years since Clerks II was released in theaters. Naturally Smith highlighted the latter’s anniversary, but he also took the opportunity to look back on his career, which included telling a story about running into a VHS tape that meant a lot to him.
Just like with the first two Clerks movies, Kevin Smith will be shooting Clerks 3 within the Quick Stop convenience store, which includes the area that once housed RST Video. In his Instagram post commentating Clerks II’s 15th anniversary, Smith stated that while getting ready for Clerks 3’s production in that area, he ran into a VHS tape containing episodes of Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman, which sent him on a journey of recollection. You can read his story in full below.
Kevin Smith has certainly come a long way from those days of Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman while working at the Quick Stop The series debuted on ABC in 1993, the same year that Smith shot Clerks. The movie premiered the following year, and Smith’s filmmaking career was launched. In the decades since, along with building the View Askewniverse and delivering other movies like Jersey Girl and Tusk, he’s also been able to work on geek properties that he enjoyed so much in his younger years, from directing episodes of Supergirl and The Flash to collaborating with Marvel Comics icon Stan Lee. Smith ended the post expressing gratitude for all the opportunities that have come his way, and this week was definitely an appropriate time to do so.
Although Clerks established the View Askewniverse, and many of its characters, most notably Jay and Silent Bob, returned for other movies, 2006’s Clerks II marked the first time since Clerks’ release that we re-focused on Brian O’Halloran’s Dante and Jeff Anderson’s Randal for their own story. Unfortunately for them, Clerks II starts with the Quick Stop and RST Video burning down, so most of the sequel was set at their new place of employment, a Mooby’s fast food restaurant. But by the end of the movie, Dante and Randal acquired the money to rebuild Quick Stop and RST Video to run themselves, and that’s where we’ll reunite with them and their supporting cast of characters when Clerks 3 rolls around.
Clerks 3 has been in the works since the early 2010s, and originally Kevin Smith wrote the threequel “like a King Lear movie in a convenience store.” However, after the filmmaker suffered a heart attack in 2018, he felt that the story was too bleak and decided to rewrite it. Now Clerks 3 will follow Randal surviving his own heart attack, and in the aftermath, he decides to make a movie about his life working in a convenience store. Sounds awfully meta, no?
Along with Clerks 3, Kevin Smith will also keep exploring the View Askewniverse through Twilight of the Mallrats. Keep checking back with CinemaBlend for more updates concerning both those projects, but as of today, you can watch the first five episodes of Masters of the Universe: Revelation, which Smith developed, on Netflix.
