Following his return to the View Askewniverse in 2019 with Jay and Silent Bob Reboot, filmmaker Kevin Smith has been keeping busy recently going back even further to his roots with Clerks 3. The long-awaited sequel to 2006’s Clerks II kicked off principal photography at the beginning of August, and as it turns out, filming will conclude right as the month ends. Smith commemorated the occasion with a social media post featuring him and costar Jason Mewes.
It wouldn’t feel like a Clerks movie, or frankly any kind of View Askewniverse movie, without Jason Mewes and Kevin Smith’s hetero-lifemate characters Jay and Silent Bob present. So naturally they’ll pop up in Clerks 3, and Smith went on social media earlier today to inform the public that the threequel is wrapping up production.
Kevin Smith and Jason Mewes have come a long way from when they did Clerks, which has become one of the most famous independent movies. It will celebrate its 30th anniversary in just three years, but ahead of that, Clerks 3 will mark their 10th movie together. Jay and Silent Bob may be much older compared to when we met them, but it’s good to see that these two still enjoy working with one another. And on Smith’s end, he’s already cut together approximately an hour of Clerks 3, so maybe he’ll end up finishing the entire movie way ahead of schedule.
Clerks 3 began filming on August 2 in Red Bank, New Jersey, marking the end of its more than decade-long stay in development hell. Smith described the original version of Clerks 3 as being like “a King Lear movie inside of a convenience store,” but after suffering a heart attack in early 2018, he decided to scrap that story because it was filled with too much “doom and gloom.” Instead, Smith decided to take inspiration from his own life, so Clerks 3 is now following Randal Graves filming a movie about his life as a convenience store clerk after suffering his own heart attack and facing his mortality.
Along with Jeff Anderson reprising Randal and Brian O’Halloran returning as Dante Hicks (who cameoed in Jay and Silent Bob Reboot), Clerks 3 also sees the return of Rosario Dawson’s Becky Scott, Trevor Fehrman’s Elias Grove and Marilyn Ghigliotti Veronica Loughran. Lionsgate acquired the worldwide rights to Clerks 3, though a release date hasn’t been set yet.
While this may end up being the last Clerks movie, Kevin Smith fans don’t need to worry about this being the final installment in the View Askewniverse, as he’s also working on Twilight of the Mallrats. But if you’re looking for a new Smith project to watch now, the first five episodes of Masters of the Universe: Revelation, which he developed, are available on Netflix.
