Clerks 3 Trailer Officially Released Online

Indie filmmaker and geek icon Kevin Smith has released the trailer for Clerks III online, giving fans their first look at many of the movie’s characters in more than a decade. The film, which will be released this fall, follows up with Dante Hicks (Brian O’Halloran), Randal Graves (Jeff Anderson), their co-conspiritors Becky (Rosario Dawson) and Elias (Trevor Fehrman), and the New Jersey convenience store that served as the birthplace of Smith’s View Askewniverse, his own little shared cinematic universe of films that predated Marvel’s by about 15 years, and includes 8 films (including Clerks III).

Smith’s last film, Jay & Silent Bob Reboot, happened in the same universe, but out of the Quick Stop gang, Jay (Jason Mewes) and Bob (Kevin Smith) really only saw Dante — and even then only briefly. Clerks III will presumably reveal whether Jay, Bob, Dante, and Randal are still business partners at the Quick Stop or not. 

That’s something that came up toward the end of Clerks II: Randal, in a moment of clarity while sitting in a jail cell, admitted to Dante that if he could do anything with his life, he would reopen the (then-closed) Quick Stop and run it himself with Dante at his side. The only obstacle was money which, it turned out, Jay and Bob had plenty of due to their lucrative side hustle of selling marijuana illegally. By Jay & Silent Bob Reboot, they had opened a storefront dispensary — but apparently never got it properly permitted, because it was shut down by the cops.

You can see the trailer below.

The movie, which is set to be distributed by Lionsgate, is Smith’s first new feature film since Jay & Silent Bob Reboot, in which Brian O’Halloran’s Dante Hicks, the point-of-view character in the original Clerks and its 2006 sequel, Clerks II. That movie was the last time fans got a look at Jeff Anderson’s Randal Graves, who appears to be the lead in Clerks III.

Randal, who has always been something of a wish-fulfillment character for Smith himself, is set to suffer a life-threatening heart attack in the movie, as Smith did in real life. It will spur the lifelong slacker to find the one thing he likes better than working retail and making fun of his customers: he’s going to make a movie.

A movie about working retail and making fun of his customers, naturally.

There have been a few different ideas for Clerks 3 over the years, with one getting so far that there was a live script reading in 2020. Smith has suggested in the past that the holdout was Jeff Anderson, who is more reluctant to return to the world of Clerks than the rest of the cast. Randal is irreplaceable, though, and without all of the leads on board, Smith has said that it’s a non-starter. This time, Smith brings back Marilyn Ghigliotti, who played Dante’s girlfriend Veronica in Clerks. She is the rare View Askew lead who has not been seen in another of Smith’s movies since, making her return especially significant.

The first Clerks centered on one very bad day in the life of Dante Hicks, a convenience store worker who got called into work on his day off and spent the whole shift dealing with belligerent customers, freak occurrences, a sex-obsessed ex-girlfriend, and his obnoxious best friend, Randal. Clerks II saw Dante ready to settle down and get married — but secretly in love with someone else, and dealing with the reality that he has one day to decide where his heart lies.

Clerks 3 will be released this fall.