 What's up and welcome to One Take. I'm Gil and I want to talk about Clerks III. This is a movie that Kevin Smith actually announced back in 2014 and I was really excited about it back then. I'm a huge Kevin Smith fan. If you haven't watched the sort of documentary film in Evening with Kevin Smith, it's actually more of like a concert film showing you clips of him speaking at different schools. If you haven't watched that, I highly recommend it. That's the thing which made me a huge Kevin Smith fan for life. So even though I loved Clerks I, didn't like Clerks II as much, but I still liked it. I was psyched to hear that a Clerks III was on the way. Then that kind of seemed to go by the wayside and Kevin Smith started talking about a Mall Rats II, which at one point he was calling Mall Brats, because I guess it was about the main character's children or they were involved somehow. Then Mall Rats II started to turn into a TV show, and then that ended up not working out. It seemed like Clerks III was finished. At one point Kevin Smith said that one of the cast members doesn't want to return, so it's off. Eventually we realized and kind of knew from the start, just based off of other things that had been said previously, we all figured out it was Jeff Anderson who played Randall that didn't want to return for Clerks III. So it seemed like that's it. The project was done. Now all of that talk got me excited, at least at the idea of Kevin Smith coming back to the view-askew universe that all these characters reside in. So it seemed like after years of being away from it, Kevin Smith wanted some kind of return to the view-askew universe. And we're actually getting it very shortly. Jay and Silent Bob Reboot will bring back Jay and Silent Bob of course, and a lot of these other characters. I figured that with Jay and Silent Bob Reboot Kevin Smith is going to come back one more time and then he's truly done with the view-askew universe. And I was really bummed to find out that in New Jersey recently, he actually did reading with a whole bunch of his friends of the Clerks III script. And thinking that that movie's never going to happen, I was super bummed to realize that I missed that reading. And I have no excuse because I was in town. I easily could have taken a train to New Jersey and gotten what I thought was my only chance to see Clerks III performed in some way, shape, or form. But it turns out that Clerks III is back on. Kevin Smith has rekindled his friendship with Jeff Anderson. And it seems like that is a trend for Kevin Smith lately. He recently reconnected with Ben Affleck and got him to come back for, I don't know how big a role, but he's in Jay and Silent Bob Reboot. And in fact, Kevin Smith made reference to that saying, we're essentially getting a Chasing Amy sequel in a portion of Jay and Silent Bob Reboot. And I'm excited to see how that plays out. Chasing Amy was one of my favorite Kevin Smith movies. This Clerks III announcement happened officially on Kevin Smith's Instagram, where he said, it'll be a movie that concludes a saga. It'll be a movie about how you're never too old to completely change your life. It'll be a movie about how a decade-spanning friendship finally confronts the future. It'll be a movie that brings us back to the beginning. A return to the cradle of civilization in the great state of hashtag New Jersey. It'll be a movie that starts Jeff and Brian O'Halloran with me and Jay in supporting roles. And it'll be a movie called Clerks III. Now I should mention that somehow I missed a news story from July. And I usually keep up on everything Kevin Smith. But apparently at Comic Con, he said it in front of the audience, when I wrote Clerks III, I wrote it during a weirder, darker point in my life. And it's kind of like the King Lear of our movies. I love it. It's one of my favorite scripts. But it's dark. It's bleak. And it's not what Dante and Randall deserve. We're never going to make that version of Clerks III. But I'm going to write a different Clerks III. And we're going to make that effing film, I promise. And in a world where we got to bring Ben Affleck back, I'll be able to bring Jeff Anderson back. On his Instagram post, Kevin Smith revealed a few other things. He talked a little bit about how he mended fences with Jeff Anderson. And one important piece of information is he says, this won't be the old script we almost made a few years back. This is a completely new screenplay that I just started writing last night. So it seems like this is something he's been thinking about for a little while. Back when he mentioned this in July, I don't know if he'd already started those talks with Jeff Anderson. Was it a sure thing at that point? Or was it just him deciding, I'm going to make this happen and we're finally seeing it come to fruition. I don't know what happened here exactly, but I am excited. Like I said, I'm a huge Kevin Smith fan. And it's easy to be cynical about these sorts of things. There are a lot of movies that came out a long time ago, which are getting reboots, sequels, prequels. But I think Kevin Smith's movies are the rare situation where I don't think sequels tarnish the original. I think sequels are appropriate here because some of his movies are just silly. Mallrats is a pretty silly movie. Jay and Silent Bob, Strike Back is a pretty silly movie. And in those cases, a sequel is just a chance to spend more time with those characters, have a few more laughs. It's hard to really ruin the integrity of the original. Then you have movies like Clerks, where it's certainly a comedy, but it's more than that. You really form a connection with those characters and you don't want to see something tarnish that. But at the same time, the Clerks movies, Chasing Amy, to some extent Mallrats, these movies had things to say. It was Kevin Smith talking to us and saying something about issues that you face that feel very particular to that age. Clerks felt like it talked about what you deal with in your 20s. Clerks too felt like it was about what you deal with in your 30s. And now I feel like Kevin Smith has something more to say and he feels like Clerks 3 is the way to do it. So personally, I'm psyched to get another chance to hang out with Randall and Dante. I'm really curious to see where this goes. I'm kind of curious to see if Kevin Smith's recent health problems play any role in the story he decides to tell. If you haven't heard, I'm sure most of you have, Kevin Smith suffered from a pretty massive heart attack in the last year or so and he's since turned his life around. He's become a vegan, lost a bunch of weight, is way healthier now and he's said that he doesn't think it's really going to impact his stories. He's not going to become more serious or more bitter or anything like that. But with a movie like Clerks, which is so personal to him and it feels like it's him talking to us, it's hard for me to imagine that it's not in some way going to influence him. But I'm sure we'll hear a lot more about this movie because Kevin Smith certainly likes to talk and I'm going to listen so can't wait to see where this all goes. Anyway, thanks for watching and if you enjoyed this video, make sure to hit the like button, subscribe to this channel and click the little bell icon to make sure you get notifications whenever we make more videos like this one.