Cue all the jokes about Kevin Smith’s retirement, because he’s in the news again as he announced in a recent Reddit AMA that he has put Clerks III on the back burner so he can work on another project, Comes the Krampus. Although Smith originally planned on directing Comes the Krampus after Clerks III, the apparent threat of someone else beating him to the Krampus punch made him change his mind.
“Nobody but me can make a Clerks film,” Smith said in the AMA. “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.”
The Krampus is all the rage these days, terrorizing naughty little boys and girls around Christmas time as a sort of Bizzaro Santa Claus. And with the character being public domain, much like Santa himself, anyone is free to feature him in their own terrifying Christmas tales. Smith might as well be the first to take advantage of the fact that the Krampus is one of the few ideas not already beaten to death by Hollywood.
Both movies will be worked on, presumably, after the release of Tusk, Smith’s most recent project. So while the director has already announced his retirement a few times, it is indeed a most busy retirement, sort of like the cashier down at the 7-11 who looks like he must be 90 years old by now but finds such joy in his job that he can’t ever picture himself not doling out Slurpees to stoned teenagers.
Smith elaborated a bit on the timeframe for Comes the Krampus:
“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.”
Comes the Krampus will be an anthology film with different directors overseeing different segments, sort of like V/H/S but Christmas-themed. Shooting will begin in April so expect more updates shortly.
