Kevin Smith Says He’s Finally Freed Dogma from Harvey Weinstein’s Claws
At long last, our prayers have been answered — Dogma is coming to streaming, and Harvey Weinstein is slowly heading straight to hell.
In 1999, Kevin Smith, a lapsed Catholic and an iconic quirky comedy filmmaker, released what was then the biggest box office draw of his career amid controversy over its hip, idiosyncratic approach to appalling blasphemy. Dogma told the story of two homicidal fallen angels — played by Matt Damon and Ben Affleck — who attempt to take advantage of a cosmological loophole by either returning to heaven or destroying all of existence while the Christian God is trapped in a corporeal form. However, in the years since Dogma became yet another one of Smith’s cult hits (no offense, Catholics), the real antagonist duo of the film proved to be far more demonic than any fallen angel: the Weinsteins.
After a decades-long rights battle with Bob and Harvey Weinstein during which Dogma fans have been unable to stream the satirical, sacrilegious comedy classic, Smith finally secured the rights to the best film role of George Carlin’s career earlier this year, and he’s planning a multi-platform celebration that will bring Dogma back into our lives. In an interview with That Hashtag Show, the View Askewniverse director and screenwriter revealed that, after he purchased the film from the company that originally struck the deal that wrestled Dogma away from Miramax, Smith will celebrate the quarter-century anniversary of the movie with a home release, a theatrical re-release, a Q&A tour headed by himself and maybe even a sequel or spin-off project.
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Twenty-five years after the Weinsteins put it in a coma, Dogma is headed to nostalgia heaven.
“The movie had been bought away from the guy that had it for years,” Smith told his host, declining to even mention the name Weinstein. “The company that bought it, we met with them a couple months ago. They were like, ‘Would you be interested in re-releasing it and touring it like you do with your movies?’ I said, ‘100 percent, are you kidding me? Touring a movie that I know people like, and it’s sentimental and nostalgic? We’ll clean up.’”
The timing of Smith’s deal with the unnamed middlemen was almost perfect, as he noted, “Right now, 2024 is our 25th anniversary, this year. November is when we came out. So I think 2025 is when the movement’s going to happen there. Back on home video, then back out in theaters, and I’ll tour it and stuff like that.”
This is tremendous news for the Dogma fans who have been hording valuable physical media copies of the film for decades while the Weinsteins kept their grip tight around the distribution rights. Following the older Weinstein’s incarceration in 2018, Smith has claimed that he attempted to purchase the rights from the embattled mogul’s lawyers, offering increasingly outrageous sums of money, but the spiteful sex offender refused to transfer the film to its creator.
Now that Smith finally has control over his cult-beloved IP, he teased that, on top of the re-releases, the Dogma universe could expand in the near future, as Smith suggested that he may choose to make “sequels, TV versions, in terms of extending the story. Something we could never do before.” The director added of the original Dogma, “All those people who worked on it are still viable.”
Well, maybe not all those people — with Weinstein in prison, who is going to play the disgusting shit demon?
