Kevin Smith Walks Back ‘Dogma’ Sequel Announcement

As we’ve mentioned before, Kevin Smith’s Dogma was recently freed from intellectual rights purgatory where it’s been trapped by real life poop-demon Harvey Weinstein for the past several decades. Now, Smith is able to, not only re-release the film, but to sequelize it as well. And he plans to do just that.

Smith made the big announcement at this past weekend’s Vulture Festival, suggesting that Dogma 2 would feature Matt Damon and Ben Affleck returning as fallen angels Bartleby and Loki, pleasing fans who long to see the pair together in a movie that isn’t a glorified sneaker commercial. 

During his talk, Smith did explain that he hadn’t actually locked the superstar BFFs down just yet, but he didn't foresee that being a big problem since they owed big time him for A) getting Good Will Hunting made, and B) forgetting to thank him while accepting their Oscars for writing Good Will Hunting.

But despite these caveats, Smith still seemed pretty confident about the project, proclaiming, “Some people will be like, ‘Don’t fucking touch it. You’ll ruin it. And I’m here to tell you: I will. I’m fucking tickled. I found a way in.”

Well, it turns out that his “way in” may not be quite as rock solid as some of the reporting made it seem. When Deadline posted the news on social media, stating that “Dogma 2 Is Happening With Ben Affleck & Matt Damon Returning,” Smith chimed in to clarify that he hasn’t even spoken to Damon or Affleck about it yet, and also, the movie may never actually happen anyways.

While he hopes to hammer out the script “eventually,” right now the movie only exists as a random idea that popped into his head just this past Thursday, which means that Netflix’s horny snowman movie is several days older than the seeds of the story for Dogma 2. And just because Smith has plans to write it, “that doesn’t mean a movie is getting made necessarily.”

Smith fans clearly love his talkative nature and guileless transparency, but that candid nature has also led to a whole lot of projects being announced and then never ever made. He declared that production of Mallrats 2 was imminent back in 2015, but it has yet to come to fruition. And he’s talked a lot about his unproduced Canadian horror movie Moose Jaws (“Jaws but with a moose instead of a shark”), even publicly announcing that it had secured funding. But that was six years ago.

Given this history, perhaps media outlets should take any Kevin Smith project announcement with a grain of salt before making declarative statements. While we may not be getting a Dogma sequel in the near future, Smith has said that he’s planning to take the film on a screening tour now that it’s been liberated. Kind of like Chevy Chase’s Christmas Vacation tours, but less sad, obviously.