“Nobody but me can make a CLERKS film,” said Kevin Smith in a Reddit AMA Thursday. “But ANYONE can make a Krampus picture. So before anyone else does, I figured it’s time to keep moving forward: we’re gonna shoot COMES THE KRAMPUS in April, before CLERKS III.”

Comes the Krampus is a holiday horror anthology Smith announced a few weeks back. Different directors will each oversee segments of the film. The plan originally was to make it after Smith did Clerks III. That’s now changed, however, and Clerks III is on hold until Comes the Krampus is made.

Here’s Smith’s post from a very entertaining AMA:

I like the idea of growing old with Dante and Randal, and stopping into from time to time to check on them. Love working with Brian O’Halloran and Jeff Anderson, but Dante and Randal are my boys. They lifted me up to where I am today, that pair of fictional clerks. So I like to honor them by not letting them be forgotten. And checking in on them for CLERKS III will be that.

But on the subject of CLERKS III, recently, I’ve had a big come-to-Jesus conversation with myself about my immediate future.

Last year, I turned a podcast into the best movie I’ve ever made. We call it TUSK.



This was fun and crazy creative. But more importantly? It had the benefit of never having been tried before: the first movie based on a podcast. Shit like that tickles the shit out of me: I like being first through the door. It was bold, in a not-really-bold-compared-to-folks-who-serve-in-the-armed-forces kinda way. It was me taking nearly 7 years of podcasting and saying “Hey – some of these might actually work as movies…”

So now that TUSK is nearly done (we still have our Guy Lapointe scenes to shoot this month), the idea was to gear up for CLERKS III. But then I started thinking “Isn’t that stepping backwards? Like literally?” While I love it with all of my heart, CLERKS is my past. It’s how I got started. And I’m just getting started again, after taking 3 years off, certain I was done making movies. TUSK represents something bold and new. No matter how bold I make it, CLERKS III will always have a number in the title. It will never be new. It will rock, I assure you, and it will be a worthy final installment in my mini-mart magnum opus. But it’s predicated on something I did a long time ago. I wanna keep moving forward. SModcast Pictures is becoming exactly that: we’re starting to make movies based on podcasts. TUSK was the first, and now COMES THE KRAMPUS will be next.

Now, at this point in time, nobody but me can make a CLERKS film. But ANYONE can make a Krampus picture. So before anyone else does, I figured it’s time to keep moving forward: we’re gonna shoot COMES THE KRAMPUS in April, before CLERKS III.

We’ve got a 20 day schedule and an under-3 million budget, and lots of folks returning from TUSK as well as other flicks I’ve done. Gonna be a SModCo CREEPSHOW, set at Christmas. And if we stay on schedule, by the time we start, it will have been only 4 months since the initial conversational whimsy about it on the EDUMACATION podcast, right before Christmas. That’s a real fuel to my fire now: taking weird ideas from podcast to film as quickly as possible, before anyone realizes they’re dumb ideas and they have time to fall apart.

CLERKS III is still coming. I love the script so much, I’ll make it happen, I promise. But the muse (and the Mewes) is pulling me away from something old for the moment and pulling me toward something new. And when the muse whispers, I listen. When the Mewes whispers, it’s just kinda creepy. And he spells shit wrong – even though he’s just whispering and not writing.

Read the rest of the AMA here.

He actually makes sense here. No other filmmaker is going to steal a Clerks sequel out from under him, but they might end up making the holiday anthology idea. But, I have to admit, while I admire Smith’s desire to move forward, I love the old Smith and really want to see Clerks III. This is disappointing, but understandable. What do you think?