Because everything is coronavirus, Kevin Smith is writing COVID-19 into his Mallrats sequel
Kevin Smith will continue to play the hits following last year’s abysmal Jay And Silent Bob Reboot, with the filmmaker persisting in his years-long quest to make sequels to Mallrats and Clerks. Clerks 3, which will serve as a meta riff on the first film, seems to be well on its way, while Mallrats 2: Twilight Of The Mallrats is back to being a movie after it was developed as both a TV show and a comic book. In fact, he’s using his shelter-at-home time to work on it.
Per a recent episode of the FatMan Beyond podcast, Smith’s even been forced to reckon with COVID-19 in the script, what with the pandemic accelerating the issues already facing brick-and-mortar retail. “I was working on Twilight Of The Mallrats, the Mallrats 2 script,” he said, “and so I had just read last night articles about the retail apocalypse, where 2020 was going to be the death knell for a bunch of stores anyway but the pandemic has escalated that, made it worse, and we’re about to see a lot of big box stores, big name stores that you and I have known for most of our lives just go away forever.”
He continued, “That means massive vacancies in malls, so they’re predicting the entire implosion of malls. I mean, they were already teetering, but the entire implosion of malls across America. So, as a guy who’s writing a movie set in a mall, I’m like, ‘Well that’s useful information for my line of work.’ So I had to start writing the pandemic into the movie because clearly this is going to be remembered for all time.”
You know what that means: Shuttered storefronts, designer masks from Fashionable Male, and a Magic Eye poster for Ethan Suplee’s Willam that reveals not a sailboat, but a round, red virus. Oh, and a much more nefarious stink-palm for Jason Lee’s Brody—the virus, after all, can spread through poop.
[via IGN]