Fed up with the hassle of making films that were then only going to be unfairly judged on their merits, Kevin Smith announced his retirement from feature filmmaking last year, saying his swan song would be the hockey comedy Hit Somebody. Since then, Hit Somebody ballooned into a two-parter that would allow Smith to say goodbye in the more longwinded fashion to which he is accustomed, then more recently, it swelled into six hour-long TV episodes to air on some yet-to-be-determined network. And so with the technicality of Hit Somebody not heading to theaters, now Smith has decided that he must still fulfill his self-imposed dictum of making one final feature—a feature that he’s declared will be Clerks III, despite Smith casting doubt on Clerks III back in 2010, and leaving many to assume that the proposed Clerks: The Animated Series revival might finally be enough Clerks. Does Kevin Smith contradict himself? Very well then, he contradicts himself. He is large. He contains multitudes. They all wear hockey jerseys, etc.
So now Smith’s final song of himself will end with a coda reprising its very beginning, with Smith saying he’ll get to making Clerks III “the minute Jeff [“Randal”] Anderson signs on.” Ostensibly this will follow a prolonged series of negotiations in which Anderson weighs his options, then agrees that he can always just DVR stuff that week. And then Kevin Smith will finally be ready to call it a filmmaking career, provided he doesn't suddenly decide he needs to say something more. But when has that ever happened?