Jay and Silent Bob, immortal icons of the cinema, first appeared in 1994's Clerks, and have since made appearances in both Clerks II and Jay And Silent Bob Strike Back. Since 2014, Kevin Smith has been hinting at a new outing for the pair, but nothing has ever come of it. Now, however, following a tumultuous period in the director's life (Smith suffered a heart attack in March), it seems he's moving forward on a reboot!
After a recent live recording of Smith's podcast, Smith revealed his plan for the reboot/sequel, and...well, it's pretty wild:
We're doing a sequel to Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back and it's called Jay and Silent Bob Reboot. It's us, it's me and Jay so it's not really strictly a reboot in the way that people think of a reboot. If you remember Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back it was a movie in which Jay and Silent Bob found out Hollywood was making a movie about them so they went cross country to Hollywood to stop that from happening. Jay and Silent Bob Reboot is completely f—ing different. In Jay and Silent Bob Reboot, Jay and Silent Bob find out that Hollywood is making a reboot of that old movie that they had made about them, and they have to go cross the country to Hollywood to stop it all over again. it's literally the same f—ing movie all over again. It's a movie that makes fun of sequels and remakes and reboots while being all three at the same time.
The decision to literally remake one of his earlier films has inspired both excitement and skepticism among fans, but Smith compares the move to Gus Van Sant's remake of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho:
Are you crazy? It's Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho,' and he was like, 'yeah, but it's a black and white movie. There's a whole generation of kids who will never watch this movie…Some people will argue from not until the end of time that it was absolutely f—ing unnecessary, but I like that it was just ballsy. He literally just made the same f—ing movie over again. Mine's not that, we have a completely different script, but I used the script of Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back to build the script to Jay and Silent Bob Reboot. So there' a van in it with three girls in it.
Smith's statement effectively counts as the second time Gus Van Sant has played a major role in the Jay and Silent Bob universe. We all know the first, of course:
Consequence Of Sound reports that production on the new film should begin in August, and that Smith is eyeing a 2019 release of the Jay and Silent Bob Reboot—not a moment too soon for fans who have been waiting for what feels like an eternity.
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