Mallrats Stars Explain What Stalled Kevin Smith Sequel Twilight of the Mallrats

Has the sun set on Kevin Smith's Mallrats sequel, Twilight of the Mallrats? 20 years after the Clerks filmmaker followed his indie hit with 1995's Mallrats, Smith in 2015 announced a sequel to his cult classic about freshly dumped mall dwellers Brodie (Jason Lee) and TS (Jeremy London). In 2016, Smith revealed that he had "reconfigured" the movie sequel, originally titled MallBrats, as a 10-episode Mallrats series after a "protracted negotiation" with studio Universal. Smith reworked Mallrats the Series back into a movie, and in 2020, completed a 98-page first draft for Twilight of the Mallrats — what Smith called an "unnecessary sequel set against the Mallpocalypse" with the "entire cast" returning.

"All I've heard about Mallrats 2 is that I believe Kevin wrote a script, he asked a bunch of people if they would do it, and everybody — from what I was told — said yes," Ethan Suplee, who played the 3D sailboat starer Willam, said during a recent appearance at Pennsylvania's Steel City Con. "[But] the rights are tied up at Universal, and Universal is not saying yes to making the movie."  

Added Joey Lauren Adams, who played Gwen, "I think it's something about [Universal] would do it, but they wanted domestic distribution." According to Suplee, Universal was willing to proceed with Smith's Mallrats sequel, but "they don't want to put up any money, and they want a big piece of the profits."

Smith has explained that Universal — which distributed Mallrats through the now-defunct Gramercy Pictures label once revived by Universal's Focus Features and its parent company, Comcast NBCUniversal — wouldn't allow him to self-finance the follow-up to a film that they owned. 

"We submitted the script and my agent comes back to me and he goes, 'Well, apparently Universal has never let a catalogue title go, any title they own, they've retained. They've never done something where they're like, 'Oh, you can take it back and go make a sequel.' Never in the history of the studio,'" Smith said on WMMR's The Preston & Steve Show in 2016. "So we entered a protracted negotiation with Universal trying to get it made in different pockets of the studio."

When sharing a peek at his Twilight of the Mallrats script in 2020, Smith revealed that Brodie, Rene (Shannon Doherty), William (Suplee), Gwen (Adams), Brandi (Claire Forlani), T.S., Trish (Renee Humphrey), Mr. Svenning (Michael Rooker), LaFours (Sven-Ole Thorsen), and Jay and Silent Bob (Jason Mewes and Smith) as "the returning 'Rats in an Askewniverse imagining about what happens when the sidewalk sales end, and 'happily ever after' is easier to say than live!"

Smith later shared that his decades-later follow-up to Mallrats is "about Brodie and his daughter and the death of the mall," revealing he cast his Jay and Silent Bob Reboot star Aparna Brielle to play Brodie Bruce's daughter, Banner Bruce. "The Brodie that we met in Mallrats has only been proven right in life. The world came around to his way of thinking. So, based on that, Brodie never really had to grow up and now, at this juncture in time, we face the moment when he might actually have to become an adult."

This past December, Smith said on his podcast that he's "seeing some traction on Mallrats 2: Twilight of the Mallrats" after Clerks III distributor Lionsgate was "very happy" about the performance of Smith's other long-awaited sequel that released in theaters last year. According to Smith, 2023 "could be the year that we return to the mall."