Kevin Smith Screening Extended "Snyder Cut" of Ben Affleck's Jersey Girl
Release the SMod Cut? Kevin Smith will host a one-night-only screening of Jersey Girl: The Snyder Cut, Smith's extended director's cut of his 2004 "Bennifer" bomb that starred future Batman Ben Affleck, Liv Tyler, and Jennifer Lopez. (The title riffs on the "Snyder Cut": filmmaker Zack Snyder's definitive, four-hour director's cut of his DC film Justice League.) With a 120-minute running time compared to the theatrical release's 102 minutes, the Jersey Girl re-edit features "waaaay more JLo," whose character dies early in the movie giving birth to Ollie Trinké's (Affleck) daughter Gertie (Raquel Castro).
Smith describes the Jersey Girl director's cut as "the over-2 hour version of Kevin Smith's sixth flick that's closest to his original script, with an entirely different first act that features waaaay more JLo." The Clerks filmmaker will host a "revelatory Q&A" after the screening set for 5:00 p.m. on Sunday, May 28th, at Smith's Smodcastle Cinemas theater (former Atlantic Moviehouse) in Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey, where the film was shot.
The showing marks the extended cut's first public screening since Vulgarthon 2005 at the Cinerama Dome in Los Angeles. Jersey Girl originally opened March 2004 in theaters, grossing just $35.5 million against a budget of $35 million.
Smith previously revealed he cut a wedding sequence after then-couple Affleck and Lopez's highly-publicized breakup, telling Us Weekly in a 2004 interview, "I didn't know if [it was right] to leave it in. People might forget they're watching a picture, like, 'Wait, didn't these two NOT get married?"'
Now that Bennifer is back together — the reunited couple wed in 2022 in Las Vegas — Smith is showing what he once said was "absolutely a Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez movie. But it's the good one." [Read: not Gigli.]
Jersey Girl: The Snyder Cut
"There's a very long cut of Jersey Girl, which, recently, Paramount took over Miramax, they've got most of the library and stuff, and they were talking about, 'Hey, we wanna put out Jersey Girl this year,' and I was like, 'Well I have the extended cut, which I've shown at Vulgarthon,' and if they allow me to, I wanna call that 'Jersey Girl: The Snyder Cut.' Because that term now just covers so much ground, man," Smith explained of the "Snyder Cut" title on his Fatman Beyond podcast in 2021. "It tells the story of, yes, this filmmaker is gonna get to go back and f-ckin' fine-tune and make the exact movie they wanna make."
In Jersey Girl, Ollie Trinke is a young, suave music publicist who seems to have it all, with a new wife and a baby on the way. But life deals him a bum hand when he's suddenly faced with single fatherhood, a defunct career and having to move in with his father. To bounce back, it takes a new love and the courage instilled in him by his daughter. Ben Affleck, Raquel Castro, Liv Tyler, George Carlin, Jason Biggs, and Jennifer Lopez star.