Jay And Silent Bob Reboot Plot Details Revealed
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Filmmaker and famous geek Kevin Smith recently dished up new plot details on his upcoming pic Jay and Silent Bob Reboot, which, contrary to what the title would suggest, isn't exactly a standard reboot and won't feature new actors step into the roles the eponymous pot-smoking life-mates played by Jason Mewes and Smith himself.
As Smith explained during a recent live Q&A session after an episode of his Fat Man on Batman podcast, Jay and Silent Bob Reboot will reuse the base story of 2001's Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back and infuse some sharp meta humor about Hollywood's obsession with reboots, remakes, and sequels — all part of the overall joke of the film.
"We're doing a sequel to Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back and it's called Jay and Silent Bob Reboot," Smith stated (via ComicBook.com). "It's us, it's me and Jay, so it's not really strictly a reboot in the way that people think of a reboot. If you remember Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, it was a movie in which Jay and Silent Bob found out Hollywood was making a movie about them so they went cross country to Hollywood to stop that from happening. Jay and Silent Bob Reboot is completely f***ing different."
Smith then clarified that the new film will feel different, but the events of Jay and Silent Bob Reboot make it "literally the same f***ing movie" as Strike Back. "In Jay and Silent Bob Reboot, Jay and Silent Bob find out that Hollywood is making a reboot of that old movie that they had made about them, and they have to go cross the country to Hollywood to stop it all over again. It's literally the same f***ing movie all over again," the creative said. "It's a movie that makes fun of sequels and remakes and reboots, while being all three at the same time."
Elsewhere in the conversation, Smith compared Jay and Silent Bob Reboot to Gus Van Sant's Psycho remake, which Van Sant completed in between directing Good Will Hunting and starring as himself in Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back. (Within the film, Van Sant was crafting a Good Will Hunting sequel.)
"One of my favorite little director tricks or experiments of the last 20 [to] 25 years was Gus Van Sant. He's coming off the heat of Good Will Hunting. He's an Academy Award-nominated director. The film won awards. Ben [Affleck] and Matt [Damon] won for screenwriting, Robin Williams won Best Actor in it. Gus had his pick of anything, he could do anything he wanted, and he went into Universal and he was like 'I want to remake Psycho.' They were like 'Are you crazy? It's Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho,' and he was like, 'Yeah, but it's a black and white movie. There's a whole generation of kids who will never watch this movie,'" said Smith. "I thought that was so crazy, ballsy. He wanted to do a shot-for-shot remake of Psycho, but in color with new actors. It's a very film-school experiment. It's something a young-buck director who's figuring out what they want to be, does. It felt very avant-garde. Some people will argue from not until the end of time that it was absolutely f***ing unnecessary, but I like that it was just ballsy. He literally just made the same f***ing movie over again. Mine's not that, we have a completely different script, but I used the script of Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back to build the script to Jay and Silent Bob Reboot."
Smith and Mewes are bound tight to Jay and Silent Bob Reboot, and Jamie Kennedy hopes to reprise his role as the production assistant to Chris Rock's Chaka Luther King. "Man, I hope I get in [the movie]. That'd be awesome," Kennedy told ComicBook.com, adding that he'd love for his character to get an in-film promotion. "Chaka's coffee boy, I think he needs to make a cameo! That'd be funny if now he's directing."
While Jay and Silent Bob Reboot doesn't have a penciled-in release date, Smith did mention that production will begin this August (originally intended to kick off last year), and that he hopes to get it in front of fans sometime in 2019.