After a while of no news about the Mallrats 2 premiere date, Kevin Smith has announced that the sequel will now become a 10-episode TV series, and that MGM is working on a similar deal for Buckaroo Banzai. Smith wrote the script for Mallrats 2, originally to be titled Mallbrats, after his lawyer told him he could buy the sequel rights from Universal, but wound up in lengthy legal negotiations when he found out that this was not the case.
In the end, he said in an interview with Philadelphia radio station 93.3 WMMR, “It is happening. It’s taking us a longer time to build it, but what we did was reconfigured it. You know, Mallrats is a 20-year-old movie, and the idea of sequelizing a 20-year-old movie to some people is like, ‘Why would you bother? It wasn’t successful the first time. What’d you guys make?’ We’re like, ‘Two million?’ ‘Alright, well, I don’t know if the world is screaming out for this.’ However, I went and directed an episode of The Flash, and when I went up there, it was kind of a weird game changer for my career. I felt at home in the medium.”
He continued:
“And suddenly because I did the episode of The Flash, like MGM reached out about Buckaroo Banzai and suddenly that came together and we went out and pitched yesterday and found a home for it. I can’t say who it is because that deal is not final, but yesterday we sold Buckaroo Banzai as a TV series. So, while I’m in that world and space, a couple months ago, we started reconfiguring the idea of doing Mallrats not as a film but as a series, and Universal and I are just about to close our deal to do Mallrats the series. Then we take it out into the world and find a home for it. So, instead of doing a Mallrats movie, I’m going to do 10 episodes of a Mallrats series.”
If you weren’t aware, Buckaroo Banzai is Smith’s take on The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension, the 1984 sci-fi flick that’s established a whole cult following in the age of the internet.
He looks pretty excited about the whole deal: