Kevin Smith Reveals He Is Working COVID-19 and Its Effects on Retail Into His Sequel TWILIGHT OF THE MALLRATS
I keep thinking as I watch my weekly shows that the COVID-19 pandemic should be showing up in the storylines. It’s a daily worry and fear and constant news topic that we are inundated with, and it seems like it colors every part of our lives, except entertainment because the movies and shows we are watching were made before this all began. And you have to wonder if this will be incorporated into entertainment in the future, or if everyone will want to leave it behind. It’s hard to know when we don’t have an end in sight.
Writer, director, and actor Kevin Smith has been considering the same ideas, and he recently revealed that the future of this epidemic will definitely impact the retail business and malls throughout America, so it makes sense that his characters in the upcoming Mallrats sequel, Twilight of the Mallrats, will be dealing with the fallout.
In the recent episode of his Fatman Beyond podcast, he talked about working on the script, saying:
"It's so weird. I was writing today and I was working on Twilight of the Mallrats, the Mallrats 2 script, and so I had just read last night articles about the retail apocalypse where 2020 was going to be the death knell for a bunch of stores anyway but the pandemic has escalated that, made it worse, and we're about to see a lot of big box stores, big name stores that you and I have known for most of our lives just go away forever. That means massive vacancies in malls so they're predicting the implosion, the entire implosion of malls. They were already teetering, but an entire implosion of malls across America. So, as a guy who's writing a movie set in a mall I'm like 'well, that's useful information for my line of work!,’ so I had to start writing the pandemic into the movie because clearly this is going to be remembered for all time. It's not like 'oh, why would you make, that's so topical, the Corona virus happened last year.' You'll still be hearing corona-related stories and plot lines and drops for the next five to ten years the same way post-September 11th that was everywhere."
It’s true. This is such an unprecedented time. Very few people who were alive during the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic are still alive today, which makes this the first pandemic in most of our lifetimes. I don’t think it’s like adding in a YouTube craze or popular catchphrase that is bound to fizzle out. I wish more movies and series would address the weird times we are living in. I definitely see a series of romcoms coming that feature a pair of roommates that fall in love during the quarantine. But I think it’s smart for Smith to incorporate this information into his sequel, as it ties in directly. It will be interesting to see how it comes out.