It was an announcement that came as a surprise to quite a few people, but Kevin Smith will be heading back to the mall once again for Mallrats 2. It was first revealed that he would be shooting the movie in early 2016, before announcing he’ll be doing it after Clerks 3 at the tail end of 2015. But now it seems he’ll be shooting it even sooner. On his Hollywood Babble On podcast, the director revealed that he will in fact be shooting Mallrats 2 before Clerks 3.

“We’ve been putting together Mallrats 2 [and] it’s been a real, like Blues Brothers ‘we’re putting the band back together, on a mission from Smod'”, the director said on his podcast. “So this week, we had a lot of activity behind the scenes as well and it looks like we might — it’s Mallrats and so we require a big old empty mall, and it would be nice if we could do things to the mall. So if you had a mall and the mall was eventually going away, that would let you like blow the fucking mall up, which happens in the third act. So we found a place that we can go to and in order to get to that mall before it goes away, we were talking about initially shooting Clerks 3 this summer and then we were going to get to Mallrats in the beginning of 2016. And then it jumped into 2015, where we were going to shoot Clerks and then hopefully Mallrats before the end of the year. But now, based on a fucking mall that we all dig that will be going away, the priority has become Mallrats. So the next fucking movie I’m making is Mallrats 2.”

Over the last few weeks, Smith has been revealing on Twitter and Facebook of his mission to get back all of the original cast, which as so far included Jason Lee, Jeremy London, Shannen Doherty, Ethan Suplee, Joey Lauren Adams and Renee Humphreys. But what about Ben Affleck?

“No word on Batfleck yet…but it would be fun to see if we could get him.”