Director Kevin Smith calls Mallrats 2 “a real sweet, family story”

We’ve all got that one movie that was the defining piece of cinema for us as kids. Maybe some of you can easily quote every single line from Clueless, or maybe you’ve been using the same threat from Way Of The Gun for how many years now because it never ever gets old. But me? Mallrats was my jam back when I was in high school. Hell, I’ve still got a dusty VHS version of it on my shelf, because I love that film so damn much.

It’s the kind of movie that rewards a repeat viewing. It’ll convince you that Batman has a weird sexual fantasy that everyone mistakes for the backseat of a Volkswagen and to never accept chocolate-covered pretzels from comic book nerds. It’s also a perfect example of a movie being done-in-one, a story with a beginning, middle and end that didn’t need to have a sequel made.

But Mallrats is getting that sequel. In television form that is, as director Kevin Smith announced that Mallrats 2 would feature a story told across ten half-hour episodes. A series which Smith described as “a real sweet, family story,” to Creative Screenwriting magazine:

It’s a multi-generational tale. It’s my chance to do John Hughes and Degrassi Junior High, because much like the Degrassi formula we know our legacy cast – we know Brody and Rene and T.S. and Jay and Silent Bob – and then we meet their kids. So we meet Brody and Rene’s daughter Banner Bruce, and the story takes place in his world and her world.

Nobody goes to the fucking mall anymore, so the kids are baffled by it, and Brody still believes in it in a big, bad way. The thing that I’m happiest about is that when I was doing it as a movie – I always saw the two inspirations for Mallrats as John Landis and John Hughes – and the Mallrats 2 script was very John Landis. Very antic, with guns everywhere, and lots of explosions and action, and less John Hughes.

The chance to do Mallrats as a series allows me to do more John Hughes than John Landis and particularly the area of Hughes that I never got to tackle as much as I did in Yoga Hosers: high school. Yoga Hosers was the first time I got to play with high school characters and, oddly enough, as a forty-six-year-old man I think my maturity level is just at high school level right now? … Mallrats is high school and family melodrama with cursing in it.

It’s like Degrassi Junior High if everyone said “motherfucker” and it was set in America. I love it so much. I cannot wait to do that. It excites me just to think about it.

Look, I’m interested. The thing is, Smith is very hit or miss lately with his projects. His return to cinema with Tusk resulted in the weirdest body-horror flick of all time, while Yoga Hosers (which I still really want to see) has been panned by critics because something about Nazi sausages? I dunno, but I still want to have a look at it. And that’s the magic of Smith, as this fanboy is a master at selling his ideas to audiences.

The idea of a family drama in the Mallrats universe however, has me a little bit worried however. But TV is still essentially a new platform for Smith, and I’m kind of keen to see if Jay and Silent Bob tussle with mall security yet again. And maybe this time I’ll also finally see that f***ing yacht.

Last Updated: September 13, 2016