Stan Lee Picks Kevin Smith’s Mallrats As Favorite Movie He’s Been In

With dozens of comic book movie and TV show cameos under his belt, fans might expect that one of those movies — in which comic book legend Stan Lee got to interact with the universe he had such an important hand in creating — would be his favorite, right?

Well, he does have a favorite Marvel movie cameo, but during a panel this weekend at Denver Comic Con, Lee revealed that his favorite movie role of all time was his 1995 appearance in Kevin Smith’s Mallrats, the screwball/stoner comedy that bombed at the box office but became a cult classic on home video.

(Anybody else worry about the future of this sort of movie in the absence of video stores?)

“Gee, that’s a hard one. I got a big kick out of Mallrats,” Lee told a fan who asked his favorite film. The rest of the crowd erupted into enthusiastic applause. “But it wasn’t a cameo; I really had a role in the movie. Funny thing about that: in the movie, I’m talking to the boy who was the lead, who was very unhappy becuase he was having trouble with his girlfriend, and I mentioned to him, ‘I remember I once had a girlfriend and I lost her but I’ve never forgotten her, and I think about her all the time,’ something like that. Now, I went home, and my wife said to me, ‘Now what is this about that girlfriend?’ And I learned you have to be very careful about how you explain movies to your wife.”

If he had such a good time, then, it shouldn’t surprise anybody that he’s in line to appear in Kevin Smith’s follow-up to Mallrats, originally planned as a feature film but recently announced as a TV series. It isn’t clear what the size of his role will be, but given the fact that Brodie (the character he was advising in the first film) went on to become a figure in the entertainment industry after the first movie, it’s entirely possible that the two have a closer relationship and Lee could have a bigger presence than just a cameo there, too.