Awesome! I wasn’t enthused about Hit Somebody being his last movie. It started w/ Clerks and it should end w/ Clerks. Great news!

Here’s the thing: He has publicly shunned the idea of Clerks 3 COUNTLESS times, saying it’d be pathetic to look at the clerks’ lives at 40 and even worse to see Jay and Silent Bob at that age, despite the fact their happy ending WAS actually a lifetime of clerking. I paraphrased it but they’re essentially his own view.

So to say Clerks 3 will be the final film from him seems like MASSIVE backtracking after realising his ‘final film’ will no longer be a film even if it serves the Hit Somebody story better to do it as a miniseries. He just doesn’t want to end his ‘film’ career with a series. Which is fair enough but to say Clerks 3 (or ANY other movie) was always the plan? No. Just no. He has said even more than publicly shunning the idea of Clerks 3 that Hit Somebody is the last story he even has left in him, because it’s a summation and metaphor for his own whole career and life.

THAT SAID. If you listen to the MCR interview in the most recent SModcast, I think I know the perfect story for Clerks 3. Randall and Danté ACHIEVE their dream. After doing up the store, Quickstop becomes a chain of franchises across the East Coast. They have plush, office-based corporate jobs now and no longer work behind the counter. But now, because of the busyness of their lives, they feel empty, like they have no life outside of their business (much like Smith/MCR said they lost inspiration after throwing their entire lives’ experiences into their early work and had nothing left – for a while – to put into later projects).

So yes, while it’s a bleak start, it DOES gel with the ‘happy ending’ of Clerks 2 without actually destroying Clerks 2′s ending’s own effectiveness. It shows how dreams actually change and it’s okay to let them change, rather than pigheadedly try to hang onto them even after their initial thrill has faded.

And yes, of course it’d be nice to bookend his film career with Clerks films. Let’s just not kid anyone: it STARTED with clutching at straws, trying to appease old fans and his own ‘one last film’ mantra. Let’s just hope he FINISHES it with a heartfelt, true metaphor for changing dreams/careers. I do think the MCR interview is what pushed his Clerks 3 decision. Even though it was a small part of the whole interview, those moments talking about dreams changing/etc definitely seemed to hit him – you can hear it in his voice.

I feel like you’ve over thought this.

So Kevin Smith is giving up before they need a forklift to cart him from scene to scene on the sets? Wise move George Lucass.