Kevin Smith isn’t finished with Tusk just yet. His 2014 film, followed a real-life ad that had been placed for a lonely and strange soul who was looking for a roommate with very strange prerequisites. The film saw Justin Long being savagely transformed into a walrus by way of insane body horror. Audiences were torn in half on this one. Either you hated it or you loved it. It was very strange and for a very niche group of horror folks.
The sequel is set to bring Wallace aka Justin Long out of his zoo enclosure to be rehabilitated. Sadly, it doesn’t go as planned. Smith has been wanting to tell the story for a while and with his brush with death and a massive heart attack he really wants to tell the story within the next couple of years.
“Early on I was always like, Well, eventually, they’ll take them out of that walrus skin and try to rehabilitate them. And just like Harvey Dent in The Dark Knight Returns, he’ll only ever see himself one way. Then he becomes the Howard Howe, Justin Long becomes the crazy guy who’s trying to turn people into something else, Chimera things, half-human and half-whatever. Last time it was walrus, this time…you’ll see.”
Smith went on during his Fatman Beyond podcast to explain, “Tusks,” it will be stylized as “Tusk$. “I would be stupid not to make what I’m calling Tusk$,” Smith said. “And yes, just like when Jim Cameron pitched Aliens, the ‘S’ in Tusks has a dollar sign through it, kids. It has everything to do with the plot of the story, but it’s also just me nakedly communicating my ambition that I’m going to correct the past. If you live long enough, sometimes you do sh-t just to be like…I don’t think we were wrong, I think we were early.”
Smith plans to release Tusk$ in 2024 and plans a roadshow-type release similar to the one he is doing for Clerks III.