Kevin Smith Shares Original Ending To Clerks, Where Dante Gets Killed

In the course of the last couple of days, filmmaker Kevin Smith has shared both script pages and footage from the “Snyder Cut” of Clerks — that being the early festival cut, which ends with Dante Hicks (Brian O’Halloran) being shot and killed by a robber at the Quick Stop. In previous interviews, Smith has said that he removed the sequence in part because it didn’t feel like it fit in Clerks. He has suggested that it was inspired by the tone and approach of other indie films popular in the early ’90s, but ultimately decided against the downer ending — even if Dante himself argued earlier in the film “that’s what life is — a series of down endings.”

The film centered on Dante Hicks, who was called in to work at his job as assistant manager of a convenience store on his day off. The day turned out to be singularly eventful (and mostly awful) as he learned that the love of his life was engaged to someone else; another high school girlfriend had died and he was missing the funeral; and he was fined hundreds of dollars for ostensibly selling cigarettes to a minor when it was his slacker friend Randal (Jeff Anderson) who actually did it.

You can see the script pages below, and the YouTube video of Dante’s death (as seen on the Clerks X DVD release and elsewhere) below.

In the time since Clerks was released, the character of Dante Hicks has appeared in Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back, Clerks II, and Jay & Silent Bob Reboot. O’Halloran has played other members of the Hicks family in Mallrats and Dogma, plus an unnamed MTV executive in Chasing Amy, which takes place in the same shared universe as the other films.

Interestingly, aside from Julie Dwyer (Dante’s ex-girlfriend, whose death is referenced in Clerks, Mallrats, and Chasing Amy), death for significant players in Kevin Smith’s View Askewniverse is incredibly rare. Had this ending held, Dante would be the only lead character from Clerks, Mallrats, Chasing Amy, Clerks II, or the two Jay & Silent Bob movies to die. Only Dogma saw significant character deaths — and those were for villains Bartleby (Ben Affleck) and Loki (Matt Damon), plus George Carlin’s comic-relief character Cardinal Glick.

Clerks III is set to go into production following the completion of Twilight of the Mallrats, so expect principal photography to begin sometime in 2022.