Instead, Smith decided to take inspiration from his own life, so Clerks 3 is now following Randal Graves filming a movie about his life as a convenience store clerk after suffering his own heart attack and facing his mortality.
Smith described the original version of Clerks 3 as being like “a King Lear movie inside of a convenience store,” but after suffering a heart attack in early 2018, he decided to scrap that story because it was filled with too much “doom and gloom.”
Clerks 3 began filming on August 2 in Red Bank, New Jersey, marking the end of its more than decade-long stay in development hell.