Kevin Smith first announcedJay & Silent Bob Rebootlast year and the script has been finished for nearly a year now. But a lot has happened since then. Smith suffered a massive heart attack back in February of this year and has been taking time to fully appreciate everything in life, and now, it’s time for Jay and Silent Bob to officially ride again. While speaking at a Fatman on Batman live Q&A session, Kevin Smith detailed some plans forJay and Silent Bob Rebootand also announced that production is set to begin this summer.
We’ve known for a while thatJay and Silent Bob Rebootisn’t going to be a normal reboot by today’s standards andKevin Smithis now doubling down on that idea. It’s going to be a sequel to Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, while making fun the reboot. We’re going to see the same story told again, but in a far different fashion. Smith had this to say.
“We’re doing a sequel to Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back and it’s calledJay and Silent Bob Reboot. It’s us, it’s me and Jay so it’s not really strictly a reboot in the way that people think of a reboot. If you remember Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back it was a movie in which Jay and Silent Bob found out Hollywood was making a movie about them so they went cross country to Hollywood to stop that from happening. Jay and Silent Bob Reboot is completely fcking different. InJay and Silent Bob Reboot, Jay and Silent Bob find out that Hollywood is making a reboot of that old movie that they had made about them, and they have to go across the country to Hollywood to stop it all over again. it’s literally the same fcking movie all over again. It’s a movie that makes fun of sequels and remakes and reboots while being all three at the same time.”
Jay and Silent Bob RebootcostarJason Meweshas read the script and says that it’s hilarious and very clever, which sounds perfect for fans of Kevin Smith. When asked about when the reboot/sequel will start filming, Smith revealed that production will begin in August of this year in order to get everything finished for an August of 2019 release date. If all goes well, we should be seeing the return of a lot of Kevin Smith’s allies from over the last two decades and even some new friends who have yet to join Smith on screen.
While talking aboutJay and Silent Bob Reboot, Kevin Smith likened his vision to Gus Van Sant’s decision to remakePyscho. The director hinted that we could end up seeing some shot-for-shot remakes of Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, which seems bizarre, but also pretty intriguing. Smith seems to like the absurdity of the reboot being totally unnecessary. He explains.
“One of my favorite little director tricks or experiments of the last 20-25 years was Gus Van Sant, He’s coming off the heat ofGood Will Hunting. He’s an Academy Award-nominated director. The film won awards. Ben and Matt won for screenwriting, Robin Williams won Best Actor in it. Gus had his pick of anything, he could do anything he wanted, and he went into Universal and he was like I want to remakePsycho. They were like Are you crazy? It’s Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, and he was like, yeah, but it’s a black and white movie. There’s a whole generation of kids who will never watch this movie… I thought that was so crazy, ballsy, he wanted to do a shot-for-shot remake of Psycho, but in color with new actors. It’s a very film-school experiment. It’s something a young-buck director who’s figuring out what they want to be, does. It felt very avant-garde. Some people will argue from not until the end of time that it was absolutely fcking unnecessary, but I like that it was just ballsy. He literally just made the same fcking movie over again. Mine’s not that, we have a completely different script, but I used the script of Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back to build the script toJay and Silent Bob Reboot. So there' a van in it with three girls in it.”
