While many of us are spending our quarantine time vegetating on the couch, binging Netflix and wondering why we can’t summon the mental willpower to start writing that novel we promised ourselves we would, Kevin Smith is as tirelessly productive as ever and has finished the first draft of the screenplay for his Mallrats sequel.
Smith previously talked about using the lockdown to work on neglected scripts, and now the focus has paid off, it seems, with the filmmaker making the following announcement on his Instagram page accompanied by a brief taste of what we can expect from the pic:
In case you’re unaware, the standard length for a script is between 95 and 120 pages – one page per minute of screen time is the general rule of thumb – so for the finished work to be at the lower end of the range is, as he said, indicative of the fast pace of the movie.
Although Smith listed the characters, the actors playing them were not mentioned by name, but if any of them don’t return it will likely involve a rewrite rather than have another actor play them. The reason why Clerks 3 stalled for so long was because Jeff Anderson wasn’t interested in playing Randall again and Smith presumably didn’t want to recast the role. There may also be a few new faces, too.
In any case, it’ll be interesting to see how the concept will be updated to reflect the characters’ advancing ages, as people in their early 20s aimlessly hanging around a mall is somewhat standard, but for people in their 40s it would just look pathetic. Presumably, Smith has devised ways for their lives to have moved on in (possibly) productive ways, while also coming up with a premise that brings them back. The latter of these will most likely involve the coronavirus realities that Smith previously announced he intended to incorporate, such as the pandemic shifting the structure of retail environments to the extent that many of them are closing permanently, hence the movie’s current title Twilight of the Mallrats.
In these uncertain times, we can all use something to distract us from the ante-apocalypse playing out just beyond our windows, so having something as doubtlessly fun as Mallrats 2 to look forward to will at least partially alleviate the stress.