More than 25 years later, he’s still not supposed to be here today.

Writer/director Kevin Smith has been promising another Clerks sequel for quite a while, and now he’s making good. Clerks III is scheduled to go into production in — where else? — New Jersey next month. Lionsgate has picked up the film for distribution around the world.

Per Deadline, Smith will direct his own screenplay, and will reappear in the film as Silent Bob alongside all of the key Clerks cast members, including “Jeff Anderson as Randal, Brian O’Halloran as Dante, Jay Mewes as Jay, Smith as Silent Bob, and Rosario Dawson as Becky.”

In a statement, Smith said “Thanks to Lionsgate, we get to return to where it all started with almost the whole cast that started it all! And for the first time since the first time we ever made a movie in 1993, we’re shooting the entire flick on location in New Jersey, as an ode to both the enduring allure of cinema and the resourcefulness and lunacy of its storytellers.”

Smith also reacted to the news on Twitter by posting a poem:

Clerks was the film that launched Smith’s career in 1994; he made it for just $27,000 by maxing out his credit cards and selling his comic-book collection. Its key characters, primarily convenience store and video store clerks Dante and Randal, returned in other Smith films, then got their own proper sequel in 2006’s Clerks II. (The characters also starred in their own short-lived animated series on ABC.) Dante also appeared in Smith’s 2019 film Jay and Silent Bob Reboot, which was not a reboot and continued the same View Askew storyline as all of Smith’s most popular films.

I like the fact that Smith is shooting the entire movie in New Jersey. It’s only appropriate. But Randal couldn’t possibly still work at a video store, right? There’s no way one still exists in suburban Monmouth County in 2021.

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