Kevin Smith Reveals Plot Details About Clerks III, Will Be Inspired by His Own Heart Attack

Days after Kevin Smith announced Clerks 3 was a go, the filmmaker has revealed the first plot details of the upcoming threequel. In a chat with TheWrap, Smith revealed the plot is pulled from his very own health scare from last year. In the film, Randal (Jeff Anderson) has a heart attack and his recovery leads him on a life-changing adventure. Smith himself suffered a near-fatal heart attack last February.

"Randal has a heart attack, decides that he came so close to death, and his life has meant nothing, there's nobody to memorialize him, he has no family or anything like that," Smith explains of the threequel. "And in the recovery, while under fentanyl, he comes to the conclusion at mid-life, having almost died, having worked in a movie store his whole life and watched other people's movies, he tells Dante, I think we need to make a movie. So Dante and Randal make Clerks. That's the story of Clerks 3."

Smith has a third Clerks movie in the hopper for quite some time with some friends and he even going the length to publicly read one iteration of the script earlier this summer. After he ended up making amends with Anderson, Smith decided to overhaul the script and start shopping around a third Clerks film.

"I'm going to bring my boys right back to where they brought me. I'm writing it, it writes itself because I f—ing lived it 25 years ago," continues the filmmaker. "It's just warm and f—ing wonderful. They're figuring it out the same way I figured it out, but I have the benefit of being able to cherry pick all my favorite stories and moments of making Clerks and putting it right back into their hands."

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3 CLERKS! Thanks to the good folks at @leeloomultiprops, I got to see Randal! #JeffAnderson, @jaymewes, and I spent Saturday signing stuff and catching up, seeing so much movie merch that’s been made over the last 25 years (hit the Leloo site for sweet signed skateboards)! But even better than that? We talked about making a movie together. It’ll be a movie that concludes a saga. It’ll be a movie about how you’re never too old to completely change your life. It’ll be a movie about how a decades-spanning friendship finally confronts the future. It’ll be a movie that brings us back to the beginning - a return to the cradle of civilization in the great state of #newjersey. It’ll be a movie that stars Jeff and @briancohalloran, with me and Jay in supporting roles. And it’ll be a movie called CLERKS III! To be great is to go on. To go on is to go far. To go far is to return. And we’re all gonna return to the scene of the crime! This won’t be the old script we almost made a few years back: this is a completely new screenplay that I just started writing last night! And so far, it’s like a dream come true! After mending fences with @benaffleck earlier this year, I was hoping for a chance to do the same with Jeff - so huge thanks to Leeloo Multiprops for getting us all in the same room. But the biggest thanks ever go to Jeff, for being receptive to the idea at all. This means I’m gonna get to play with my two favorite inaction figures again: Dante & Randal! Two weeks from the debut of @jayandsilentbob Reboot (on @fathomevents screens 10/15 & 10/17, link in my bio), I’m ecstatic to announce our imminent return to Quick Stop! So I assure you: we’re open! #KevinSmith #clerks3 #jaymewes #jayandsilentbob #danteandrandal #quickstop #leeloomultiprops #indiefilm #clerks

A post shared by Kevin Smith (@thatkevinsmith) on Oct 1, 2019 at 5:51am PDT

It's unclear when Smith plans to enter production on Clerks 3 or who will distribute it; the first two films in the franchise were attached to Harvey Weinstein's The Weinstein Company.

Clerks 3 has yet to set a release date. Jay & Silent Bob Reboot is set for release October 15th.