Kevin Smith’s “Dogma” is back.
After touring the film to sold-out crowds earlier this year, Smith’s controversial 1999 feature returns to theaters everywhere June 5 via Iconic Films, complete with a Q&A that was recorded at the first stop of the tour. What makes the movie’s resurrection so miraculous is the fact that the film, which stars Ben Affleck and Matt Damon as a pair of fallen angels looking to make hell on earth, had been out-of-print and downright impossible to stream (legally, at least) for years.
In fact, until recently, it had been under the control of Harvey Weinstein. That’s right – a movie about angels had long been trapped by a man many see as the devil.
How “Dogma” made its way back to cinemas, on more screens than it did in 1999, is just as dramatic and unexpected as anything in the movie.
Lost in limbo
Back in 2022, we talked to Kevin Smith about “Dogma.” He was promoting “Clerks III,” but we were curious what had happened to his critically acclaimed religious comedy. You couldn’t find it anywhere. It wasn’t on any of the streaming services and a long out-of-print Blu-ray (from Sony) was going for exorbitant prices on the secondary market. Most of Smith’s other major works were not only always available but regularly reissued, festooned with special features and sporting improved audio and video. You can own a 4K copy of “Mallrats.” Just think about that.
Smith told us that before “Dogma” was going to be released, Disney, then the parent company of Miramax, got cold feet. Weinstein was told by then-Disney CEO Michael Eisner not to make “Dogma.” When he did anyway, Eisner pressured Weinstein to “sell it off.” Instead, Weinstein acquired the movie himself (he had done something similar for “Kids,” creating a company called Shining Excalibur). Weinstein sold the theatrical rights to a pre-“Twilight” Lionsgate and the home video rights, for a limited time, to Sony.
Years passed and Weinstein established The Weinstein Company with his brother Bob. The last movie that Smith made for them was “Zack and Miri Make a Porno,” starring Seth Rogen and Elizabeth Banks, in 2008. “I don’t think he realized that he still owned that movie. I don’t think he realized that it went out of public distribution or anything like that,” Smith told us in 2022.
In 2017, out of the blue, Smith received a call from Weinstein. He asked him about “Dogma.” Would Smith be interested in a sequel? Or maybe a streaming series? Smith was encouraged. Not only was Weinstein finally acknowledging the movie – and Smith’s place in Miramax history – but there could be more to do with the property. Smith hung up, encouraged. Then a week later, a story broke in the New York Times about Weinstein’s long history of sexual abuse.
Smith told John Gordon, a former Miramax exec and producer, about the phone call with Weinstein. Gordon told Smith the truth – Weinstein had been calling everybody because he knew that the story was coming and he wanted to find out who had talked to the New York Times. “I’m guileless, I don’t see all the angles,” Smith told us in 2022. “He was calling not because he wanted to do anything with ‘Dogma.’ He wanted to see if I was one of the people who had spoken to the New York Times. I hadn’t, because I didn’t know any of that stuff.”
Years later, Smith had gotten word that a new “Dogma” DVD was coming out and that Weinstein was trying to sell the rights to the movie – for $5 million. Not only did Smith not have the money, but he thought the number was too high. “That’s not what the market bears anymore,” he told us in 2022. At the time, Smith thought that hope was lost. That his movie would never see the light of day again, much less return to theaters.
“My movie about heaven is in limbo,” Smith said at the time. He was wrong. It was just waiting for its guardian angel to arrive.
Out of purgatory
Enter Alessandra Williams.
Smith calls her “our Patronus,” referring to the magical spell that Harry Potter casts. “I tried to rescue this movie multiple times. And I had connections, I had money, I had juice, I made the movie, and I could not make what is happening happen,” Smith said. But Williams, a producer, made it happen.
Williams found a company that would buy a tranche of movies from Weinstein, because he was going back to court and needed the funds. In that tranche was “Kids;” Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11” (another movie too hot for the Eisner-led Disney, post-“Dogma”); some karate movies that Weinstein bought in the wake of “Kill Bill;” and a pair of Sophia Loren historical epics. “She did all of that so that she could get to ‘Dogma,’” Smith explained. “She sold off ‘Kids’ and the rest and ‘Dogma’ was the one that she wanted to do.”
At age 10, Williams told Smith her mom let her watch “Dogma” and she “fell in love with it.” She would watch it over and over again. Years later she saw Smith talking about “Dogma” (“It may well have been your piece,” Smith conceded) and thought, Oh, he needs help. People should see this movie.
Williams, for her part, said that she had worked for the past six years to get “Dogma.” She said that she didn’t have to deal with Weinstein very much but that her lawyers did and that it was painful. “He didn’t want to let the rights go. The price was never enough. We were hitting walls,” she said. At one point she tried to figure out a way of selling the movie with Weinstein still attached to the film. “I don’t think people wanted to get involved with him there,” Williams said. Four years into the process, she was close to giving up. Then she connected with some financiers in Dubai “who have no real stake in Hollywood and don’t care much about what’s going on in the U.S. and their politics.” She pitched them the idea of buying the whole set of films to “let me control ‘Dogma.’ … They entrusted me,” Williams said.
Williams vividly remembers her father watching “Clerks” when she was a young child. She was used to watching animated Disney movies. She had never seen anything like it and remembers thinking, Whoa, what is this? “It really set me on a path in life to be a filmmaker and to be in the industry and the business,” Williams said. Her path to the business was circuitous – she was a full-time gymnast and an elite cheerleader. She was a teenager selling designer clothes and an actress. When she was older she worked for legendary producer Marty Bregman. (“I was a sponge,” Williams said. She still is.) In 2016 she started making her own movies, but by then she was already well established. Her father was a creative director and her stepfather was a stockbroker and she started working the market at an early age. “I had the experience. I had the contacts. I had the money,” Williams said.
Together, they plotted an ambitious return for “Dogma.”
“Not only did she rescue the movie, she got in touch with AMC,” Smith said. Williams said it was her vision to have the movie in 2000 theaters. “I didn’t think anybody would be interested in that. She made them interested in it,” Smith said. “We’re living in this woman’s dream. And I keep telling her, ‘You and me are going to play the lottery, because you know how to manifest.’” Smith then puts it more bluntly: “Alessandra rescued my movie about angels from the devil himself.”
Together, they not only arranged the nationwide screenings of the movie and the national tour but they also submitted the movie to the Cannes Classics section of this year’s festival and got accepted. When I talked to Smith, he was about to leave for the festival. The first time he was at Cannes for “Dogma,” his wife was pregnant with their daughter. Now they all walked the red carpet. “Everyone cried tears of joy,” Williams said. “We had a seven-minute standing ovation, which isn’t guaranteed. The French are really tough!” While in Cannes they also started selling the international rights. “I get incoming messages every day from every territory and every country,” Williams said. “Dogma” is going global.
There was another part of the arrangement between Williams and Smith that feels divine.
“When I brought it to him, I was really excited to give him a percentage for free. His support of the film makes it so special for the fans. That’s payment enough,” Williams said. Now, said Williams, “He owns a part of ‘Dogma’ forever.”
Back in theaters
Smith marvels that this rerelease of “Dogma” will actually be on more screens than it was when the movie first came out in 1999 (2,000 compared to 1,330) and that people are buying tickets. “My entire life, I don’t think I’ve ever made a summer movie or made a movie that got released unless it was the tail end in August, and suddenly we got a movie coming out in the belly of the beast,” Smith said.
His entire tour of the movie, which started on Easter Sunday in Los Angeles, had grossed a half-a-million dollars by the time we’d talked in mid-May. Even more insane, Smith said, is that this wasn’t even in the cards a year ago. He’s been galvanized by the response from the tour – “People are like, ‘Hey, take me back to 1999 because 2025 sucks.’ We’re benefitting from that because people have this little nostalgic journey. It’s been absolutely lovely.” And unlike in 1999, Smith notes, the rerelease of the movie is not being greeted by people protesting it.
The filmmaker was only able to accommodate the “Dogma” tour because the funding for a movie he was planning to make (“Jay and Silent Bob Store Wars”) fell apart at the last minute. “There was a big hole in my schedule and all of a sudden this tour fit into it absolutely perfectly. It’s been bliss. It’s like going to church every night where I’m both the priest and Jesus,” Smith said. “Audiences are lovely and they’re overpaying to see this old ass movie. I can’t thank them enough.”
The movie has been freshly remastered and supervised by original cinematographer Robert Yeoman, who gave the team notes about coloring, to make sure it really pops. Williams said that the sound has been reworked too. “We cleaned any static and pulled everything up and made it more exciting,” she said, which includes pumping up Howard Shore’s wonderful score.
And while Smith was enticed to go back and actually “fix” things, he resisted. Like his hero George Lucas, Smith could have put out a “Special Edition” version of “Dogma.” “We could have made some of our effects look better. When it comes to CG, we were made in 1998, came out in 1999, so you’re talking about the early side of CGI,” Smith said. There’s a moment when Ben Affleck comes down in front of the church towards the end of the movie with some “very obvious CG wings.” “It feels like the cast is looking up going, What did you do with all the money? Why is this effect so cheap?” Smith joked. But the addition of new effects fell into the same discussion of reinstating some of the movie’s many deleted scenes. “I felt like, let’s show them the movie they remember,” Smith said. “The only people coming to the tour are people who loved the movie before. I didn’t want to be like, Here’s a bunch of new s–t you never saw that may lessen the experience for you.”
There will be a deluxe home video edition of the movie that Smith hopes will be out by the end of the year (“I hope by Christmas, so you can celebrate the birth of Buddy Christ himself”), which will include a bunch of supplemental material. “If there’s a 50th anniversary, I am redoing those f–king wings,” Smith pledged.
Not that the nationwide rollout is the end of this chapter of the “Dogma” saga. Smith is “working on writing” (according to Williams) a sequel right now. “We have every studio calling us, asking about it,” Williams said. A sequel was one of the things that Weinstein dangled in front of Smith, on that long ago call, while the executive was trying to find out who betrayed him. Now, Smith is working on that actual sequel, supported by people who believe in him wholeheartedly.
“I used to dream about, Could you imagine if we could take ‘Dogma’ out again? I don’t have to imagine. It’s literally happening,” Smith said. Talk about a godsend.
