Harvey Weinstein Faked Interest in a ‘Dogma’ Sequel to See If Kevin Smith Was Leaking to ‘The New York Times’

This past weekend, Kevin Smith began his Dogma: The Resurrection Tour, which involves screening the 1999 Biblical satire in movie theaters across the country and answering audience questions. As of this writing, no one involved with the Catholic church has attempted to blame the death of the Pope on the return of Dogma.

After Smith’s tour, Dogma will be getting a wide theatrical re-release, a Blu-ray edition and presumably more sequels that only exist in the director’s head. But all of this is only possible because, as we’ve mentioned before, Smith regained the rights to Dogma from real-life shit monster Harvey Weinstein. 

Not only did Weinstein hoard the movie for decades, rendering it inaccessible for fans, according to Smith, he once dangled the possibility of expanding the Dogma-verse in front of eyes, but only because he had ulterior motives.

During a promotional stop on The Woody Show, Smith explained how Weinstein ended up owning the rights to Dogma in the first place. After word of the film began stirring up controversy, Miramax’s parent company, Disney, told Weinstein, “You have to get rid of this movie. You never should have made it in the first place.”

So Harvey and Bob Weinstein personally bought the film then licensed it out to theatrical and home video distributors. “Although I never saw a receipt,” Smith pointed out. “There’s no proof that they ever paid Disney back, which is a point of contention.”

But even though he owned it, Harvey Weinstein had no interest in Dogma, ignoring Smith’s requests to renew the home video license. So you can imagine Smith’s surprise when Weinstein called him “out of the blue” years later to chat about the movie he had been actively ignoring. “And he goes, ‘Dogma, I just realized, we got it, and we’re not doing anything with it. This could be a sequel or a streaming series,’” Smith recalled. “Mind you, I haven’t heard from this person in 12 years, and I was so excited.”

While Weinstein promised Smith that he’d get the ball rolling on the project the following week, just six days later, The New York Times published a bombshell article detailing the producer’s history of sexually harassing women, the first of many damning reports about the future convicted rapist.

Smith was a little freaked out that he had coincidentally reconnected with Weinstein before the article dropped,  but he soon learned that it wasn’t a coincidence at all. After telling a former Miramax employee that Weinsten had reached out about making more Dogma projects, they bluntly responded, “He was just trying to see if you were one of The New York Times’ sources.”

Smith realized that Weinstein’s interest in Dogma “wasn’t sincere, it was him going like, ‘Is he one of the people?’ And once he had me on the phone and we talked for a minute, he was like, ‘He’s not one of them.’ And moved on.”

Although Smith was quick to point out that this dick move was still the “least egregious thing the monster ever did.”