Kevin Smith Might Actually be Making his Killer Moose Movie, Moose Jaws

You can never quite count out a Kevin Smith project, can you? The indie comedy director recently revealed some updates on long-gestating projects that fans had likely expected to never see come to fruition. Among them: Hit Somebody, a hockey drama that has been in the works all the way since 2009, and the more recent Moose Jaws, which Smith first announced in 2014. Of course, it’s sort of hard to look past the latter … considering it’s a movie about a killer moose.

Smith dropped the information during a Q&A in a live recording of his Fatman on Batman podcast in Hollywood, which he hosts alongside Marc Bernardin, saying that Moose Jaws had recently found funding. As he said at the time:

“Moose Jaws, we have money for it. Isn’t that crazy? That just happened in the last two weeks and stuff. More when I know, and I’ll know very soon.”

You’ll probably be unsurprised to know that Moose Jaws was originally described by Smith at the San Diego Comic-Con in 2014 as “Jaws with a moose.” It has often been mentioned since as the culmination of Smith’s Canadian-set horror/dark comedy “True North trilogy,” which began with 2014’s exceedingly weird Tusk and continued with 2016’s Yoga Hosers. It also seems likely that as a cinema geek, Smith is probably drawing from the mid-’70s spate of Jaws rip-offs, which memorably featured films such as 1976’s Grizzly, described as “the biggest Jaws on land.” We know more about this subject than most, having written an in-depth history of Film Ventures International, the eccentric B-movie studio that produced Grizzly and many other films in the ‘70s and ‘80s until its founder, Edward L. Montoro, disappeared. At the very least, it’s hard to believe that anyone could really make a killer moose movie with a straight face in 2018.

Hit Somebody, meanwhile, sounds like a more serious project, and one that is also apparently still alive, according to Smith, although he suggests in the same breathe that it could be a film, a comic book or a miniseries. Inspired by Warren Zevon’s song “Hit Somebody (The Hockey Song),” the story would take place in the 1970s within the World Hockey Association, during a time of change when the game was being cleaned up from its violent, goon-friendly past. Smith previously referred to the film as his last movie as a director, but in the vein of Tarantino, that can hardly be taken as gospel. Over the years, the project has evolved from a potential film to a potential TV series, but it’s hard to say when, if ever, fans will get a look at it.

Meanwhile, Smith has one more project on the horizon that will likely trump all the others in terms of audience size: Jay and Silent Bob Reboot, which is meant to start shooting in August. Teaming Smith’s Silent Bob back up with Jay (Jason Mewes) one last time, it’s a meta-satirical criticism of Hollywood reboot culture that Smith describes thusly:

“We’re doing a sequel to Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back and it’s called Jay and Silent Bob Reboot… It’s us, it’s me and Jay so it’s not really strictly a reboot in the way that people think of a reboot. If you remember Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back it was a movie in which Jay and Silent Bob found out Hollywood was making a movie about them so they went cross country to Hollywood to stop that from happening. Jay and Silent Bob Reboot is completely fucking different. In Jay and Silent Bob Reboot, Jay and Silent Bob find out that Hollywood is making a reboot of that old movie that they had made about them, and they have to go cross the country to Hollywood to stop it all over again. It’s literally the same fucking movie all over again. It’s a movie that makes fun of sequels and remakes and reboots while being all three at the same time.”

So there you go. Look for Jay and Silent Bob Reboot at some point in 2019, and if you’re very lucky, perhaps you’ll also get a killer moose movie at some point in the same year.