Kevin Smith is about as retired as Steven Soderbergh. Though he’s been comfortably hosting a podcast for sometime, his latest endeavor Tusk, a horror pastiche on The Human Centipede and Smith’s own films, has supposedly netted him enough money to finance Clerks III.
Smith announced the news on the podcast, “Hollywood Babble-On“, saying, “A year and change ago I was desperately trying to get Clerks III made for the 20th anniversary and that desperation — I must have reeked of it because I couldn’t f–king find money and shit. But it was Tusk, people going ‘Holy f–k, what else do you have?’ and I was like Clerks III and they’re like ‘done’. So, everybody that’s like, ‘He failed, he failed,’ I’m like ‘Thank you, I failed into doing Clerks III.”
What’s peculiar is that Tusk is tanking at the box office. It’s been a polarizing, if at the very least interesting outing from Smith after it first premiered at Toronto, and in its first 10 days of release it has only raked in $1.4 million across over 600 screens.
The Wrap points out that Smith first announced he was writing Clerks III via Facebook back in March. He also of course mentioned that it would, sight unseen, be the best film he’ll ever make and had at that time not yet approached any of the original cast.
The original Clerks was released back in 1994 with the follow up 12 years later in 2006. Maybe Smith is really just pulling a Richard Linklater/Before Midnight sort of thing and will release this third opus another 12 years later in 2018. And without much other word on this project other than Smith’s, that date seems about as plausible as Tusk actually being called a box office success.