One has to assume that Kevin Smith has a lot more fans now than he did in 1994, when his independent comedy Clerks, made for less than $250,000, changed the face of indie cinema. Twelve years later and five years after Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, the movie that was supposed to wrap up Smith’s five-movie “Jersey trilogy,” he’s returning to the characters who started it off, Randal and Dante, now facing their thirties and new jobs at a fast food restaurant. Smith’s fans will probably make this their #1 priority in life, but few others.

Box Office Potential: $30 to 35 million

Yahoo has a button for a sneak peak at “Clerks II” on their front page.

When you click on it, it brings you to this page, where you can peep a bunch of pics from the flick.

The holy New York Times put up their summer movie preview, and a pic of Jay and Silent Bob rides the top of the page. This is cool online, but the pic was even bigger in the actual, old-fashioned newspaper version in the Sunday edition of the Times this morning.

In Entertainment Weekly, I got a shout out on their “Must List (Ten Things We Love This Week)”. Number six was the blog-site My Boring-Ass Life, of which they wrote “Kevin Smith’s no-holds-barred online diary is like his best films: raw, openhearted, and mordantly funny.” In the mag, there’s a nice picture of me having what I can only describe as a bad hair day.

However, on the back page of EW, Stephen King does a weekly column, with the current edition being a piece detailing his summer movie predictions.

Alright, they’re not King’s predictions; they’re the predictions of a guy he calls “The Longhair”. But being that this is the guy who’s also worked under the pseudonym Richard Bachman, I’m not convinced “The Longhair” isn’t, in fact, King himself.

Regardless, “The Longhair” predicts this summer’s hits and misses, and under the heading “Flop City” (below “The Omen”, “An American Haunting”, the Vince Vaughn/Jennifer Aniston flick “The Break-Up”, and M. Night Shymalan’s “Lady in the Water”), he lists “Clerks II”. Of it, he (”The Longhair”) writes “In ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’, Major Toht tells Indy, “That time is past.” He might have been speaking of the Clerks franchise. Uh… what franchise?”

Some folks on the message board at my home-base, ViewAskew.com, thought I might be pissed at Entertainment Weekly for running this. But I got no bones with EW. Aside from the two times they’ve given My Boring-Ass Life a shout-out on their “Must List”, they also hyped “Clerks II” at Number 10 in a feature last week entitled “The Ten Movies We Can’t Wait to See”, and gave us a nice write-up in their Summer Preview Issue.

I also have no bones with someone named “The Longhair” opining that “Clerks II” will flop. You mean to tell me there’s someone out there who doesn’t give a tin-whistle about the flicks I do? I’m shocked…

However, the irony is that “Clerks II” CAN’T flop. Since our entire budget was five million bucks, if the flick makes ten million bucks theatrically, we’re successful (and that ten million theatrical doesn’t even include the DVD windfall that’ll eventually follow; our flicks do extremely well on DVD).

And there’s DEFINITELY ten million bucks worth of theatrical box office out there for us – maybe a little more than ten million, actually (”Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back” opened to eleven million the weekend it opened in August 2001, on its way to a theatrical gross of thirty million; and “Strike Back” cost fifteen million more to make than “Clerks II” did).

So when folks like “The Longhair” poo-poo the theatrical prospects of “Clerks II”, they don’t come off as offensive to me; they come off as more misinformed than anything else. “The Longhair” can chicken-little it all he (or she) wants, but “Clerks II” will never have an apartment in “Flop City”.

King and his imaginary friend aside, here’s a brief, random sampling of just a few folks who, sight-unseen, are a bit more optimistic about the future of “Clerks II”…

Austin Represent!

Chi-Town represent!

Chi-Town represent AGAIN!

College kids represent!

“Clerks II” won’t see “Superman Returns”, “X-3” or even “Snakes on a Plane”-type box office numbers, granted. But relative to the flick’s budget, it’ll mint some nice coin, to be sure.

However, box office-shmox office: what really counts is whether a flick stays with the viewer after they’ve gone home, and for how long. Considering the fact that, twelve years later, there was still enough love for/interest in “Clerks” to warrant a “Clerks II”, I’m hoping the lastest installment in Dante and Randal’s (complete lack of) adventures earns the same amount of affection, if not more. Keep the theatrical grosses, I say; I’m all about longevity.

Except, y’know… in bed. As my wife will tell you, I’m a five minute-max-kinda-guy there. But they’re some of the sweatiest, fear-of-being-crushed-inducing five minutes my woman has ever known.

So I got THAT going for me.