Kevin Smith Reveals Mallrats 2 Will Be The Next Film He Shoots

After gathering most of his cast already, Kevin Smith revealed over the weekend on his Hollywood Babble-On podcast that Mallrats 2 will be the next film he produces, once again pushing back the long-awaited Clerks 3.

Saying that scheduling concerns have forced his hand, Smith nevertheless sounded excited about the prospect and drew a congratulations from his co-host Ralph Garman.

Besides giving some details on the production (and maybe the plot? It's hard to tell if he's joking), Smith said that he's still hoping to get Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice star Ben Affleck back for the film.

We've been putting together Mallrats 2....It's been a real, like Blues Brothers 'We're putting the band back together, on a mission from Smod. So this week, we had a lot of activity behind the scenes as well and it looks like we might -- it's Mallrats and so we require a big old empty mall, and it would be nice if we could do things to the mall. So if you had a mall and the mall was eventually going away, that would let you like blow the f---ing mall up, which happens in the third act. So we found a place that we can go to and in order to get to that mall before it goes away, we were talking about initially shooting Clerks 3 this summer and then we were going to get to Mallrats in the beginning of 2016. And then it jumped into 2015, where we were going to shoot Clerks and then hopefully Mallrats before the end of the year. But now, based on a f---ing mall that we all dig that will be going away, the priority has become Mallrats. So the next f---ing movie I'm making is Mallrats 2. No word on Batfleck yet...but it would be fun to see if we could get him.

No word on whether the two sequels will take place on consecutive days, as did Clerks and Mallrats when they were first released in the '90s. In Mallrats, dialogue revealed to keen-eared fans that the movie took place the day before Smith's debut feature.

The plot of Mallrats kicks off with the revelation that a local girl named Julie Dwyer had died while swimming at the YMCA pool, hoping to lose weight ahead of her appearance on a game show which is at the center of the film's plot. The next day, Dante Hicks and Randal Graves from Clerks briefly closed the stores where they worked to visit the funeral of Dwyer, whom Dante had previously dated.