Originally, the third Clerks movie was set to be produced in 2017. A script was completed and a $8 million budget secured, but according to
Kevin Smith, the project was off the table after his friend
Jeff Anderson, who had played Randal Graves in
Clerks (1994) and
Clerks II (2006), didn't want to do it. Anderson, who had also been reluctant to do Clerks II, disliked the script in which the Quick Stop Market is destroyed by hurricane Sandy in 2012, after which Randal has a nervous breakdown. This causes him to wait in front of a cinema for a year for a screening of the film "Ranger Danger", and unwittingly become the leader of a cult-like community in the cinema's parking lot following his example. As Smith was unwilling to recast the role, he canceled the project; after his near-fatal heart attack in 2018, he made
Jay and Silent Bob Reboot (2019) instead, but two weeks before that movie was released, he revealed that he had spent an entire day signing Clerks movie memorabilia together with Anderson and
Jason Mewes (Jay). This reunion allowed them to patch things up, and provided him with so much inspiration that he immediately threw away the old Clerks III script, and started working on a new one with ideas that Anderson was receptive to. According to Smith, the old script "was so far-flung from 'Clerks.' Mercifully, we never made it. And then suddenly, I had the heart attack and was like, oh, that would be a good backbone for this movie." The new version is "a movie that concludes a saga [...] about how you're never too old to completely change your life [...] about how a decades-spanning friendship finally confronts the future."
