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Kevin Smith had given up on Dogma. By last year, the hockey-jersey-loving, New Jersey\u2013born writer-director had lost all faith that his ecclesiastical fantasy-comedy \u2014 which follows fallen angels (portrayed by Ben Affleck and Matt Damon) attempting to exploit a Catholic sin-forgiveness loophole to reenter heaven \u2014 would ever be sprung from the movies purgatory to which it had long been banished. Theatrically released in 1999, the $10 million ensemble satire (which features supporting performances by Chris Rock, Salma Hayek, Alan Rickman, George Carlin, and Alanis Morissette as God) had immediately attracted controversy. It was protested<\/a> sight unseen for its perceived irreverence toward Christian doctrine and denounced by the Catholic League and other religious groups for mocking \u201cGod, the Church, the Mass and Mary\u2019s virginity\u201d en route to grossing a healthy $30 million at the box office. But after Dogma\u2019s theatrical rollout and DVD run, the film largely disappeared from public consumption. It remained unavailable on streaming services and was kept away from digital rental by its rights holder: the disgraced former Miramax\/Weinstein Company head honcho Harvey Weinstein<\/a>.<\/p>\n Smith began trying to \u201cwrestle the movie free\u201d in 2009, angling for some kind of tenth-anniversary rerelease. He was met with stony silence from Weinstein for both personal and business reasons. The studio chief had struck a DVD distribution deal with Columbia TriStar that precluded any Dogma rerelease before 2014 \u2014 but also in 2008, Smith had bad-mouthed<\/a> Weinstein\u2019s marketing<\/a> of his sex farce Zack and Miri Make a Porno<\/a>, effectively torpedoing their studio partnership that dated back to the 1994 release of Smith\u2019s debut Clerks. Smith tried emailing Weinstein about the film again in 2014. But by then, he had managed to further infuriate the bellicose mogul by yelling at Weinstein to \u201cshut the fuck up\u201d for \u201cboisterously talking\u201d throughout a Sundance Film Festival screening of Smith\u2019s 2011 horror-thriller Red State<\/a>. In 2019, Smith offered first $250,000, then $500,000, and then (with the backing of \u201crich and famous\u201d friends) $1 million to buy Dogma back from Weinstein, who at that time was battling numerous criminal charges for rape and sexual assault and faced an avalanche of legal bills. Again and again, Harvey wasn\u2019t selling; he wanted $5 million to transfer the rights, which was too rich for Smith. \u201cSo I let it go at that point and gave up hope,\u201d the director tells Vulture. \u201cI love Dogma. But if I had $5 million, I would make a whole new movie.\u201d<\/p>\n Wordy but bawdy and showcasing a number of still viable stars, Dogma stands as one of Smith\u2019s most successful films. But were it not for the surprise intervention of independent producer Alessandra Williams<\/a>, the film would in all likelihood still be barred from theaters and kept off streaming, the exclusive province of illegal torrent sites and $200 eBay DVD copies. Williams sprung the movie from IP jail through a fire-sale purchase of a tranche of Weinstein\u2019s most infamous and treasured films. Among them: Larry Clark\u2019s \u201cNYC youth run amok\u201d drama Kids<\/a> and Michael Moore\u2019s highest-grossing documentary, Fahrenheit 9\/11, sold to a United Arab Emirates\u2013based company, Flick Ventures Holding Ltd<\/a>. Explicit in Williams\u2019s proposal to the Flick investors: \u201cI need to be in control of Dogma. We can sell all the other films, you can make your money back. And then I have Dogma.\u201d<\/p>\n The producer then struck a profit-sharing deal with AMC and helped tee up the sold-out, 20-city Dogma: The Resurrection Tour<\/a> this spring (for which Smith personally screened the film across the country and presided over rowdy Q&A sessions). Williams also brokered its official selection at the Cannes Film Festival<\/a>, where Dogma received a seven-minute standing ovation last month \u2014 and where she also sold foreign-distribution rights to the French indie sales and production company Goodfellas<\/a> on the way to her coup de gr\u00e2ce: engineering a June 5 rerelease for Dogma in 1,500 theaters across the U.S. and Canada.<\/p>\n \n Chris Rock, Kevin Smith, Jason Mewes, and Salma Hayek in Dogma. A self-described yoga master and Method actress \u2014 who has appeared in supporting roles in such films as the 2020 Mark Wahlberg\u2013starring Netflix action-comedy Spenser Confidential and the biblical drama Paul, Apostle of Christ, and who also wrote, directed, and starred in her own satirical mockumentary short Green Kola<\/a> \u2014 Williams acknowledges she is an unlikely savior for Dogma. \u201cI have not ever rescued any movies out of purgatory before,\u201d she tells Vulture via Zoom video from Cannes. \u201cI just knew the right people. It was the right time.\u201d Smith winkingly refers to Williams as his guardian angel while marveling at her ability to outmaneuver the notoriously vindictive Weinstein. \u201cShe rescued my movie about angels from the devil himself,\u201d Smith says.<\/p>\n The director and producer have big plans next: Dogma 2, which Smith has been writing over the course of the Resurrection Tour, and a streaming series set within the movie\u2019s biblical cinematic universe.<\/p>\n Smith describes Dogma as one of his most personal films. It follows Damon and Affleck\u2019s cast-out-of-paradise characters Loki and Bartleby as they maneuver to visit a New Jersey church during its rededication ceremony, where they might land a plenary indulgence. Their hope is to wipe their sin slates clean and reenter the pearly gates, though their plan would also override God and plunge the universe into chaos. Smith was a practicing Catholic at the time of Dogma\u2019s release and says the movie was not intended as a takedown of Christianity. It was an exploration of his family\u2019s religion mixed with \u201ccomic-book cosmology\u201d and a big creative swing on the heels of Smith\u2019s relatively minor 1994 breakthrough Clerks and reality-grounded comedy Mallrats. \u201cI remember what I wanted it to be,\u201d he says of Dogma: \u201cMy idea of a Sunday service. But with anal jokes mixed in.\u201d<\/p>\n Williams, for her part, grew up shuttling between Manhattan and the suburban New Jersey of Smith\u2019s View Askewniverse<\/a>. Thanks to her family\u2019s love of cinema, she first managed to watch Clerks and the R-rated Dogma at age 10, and went on to act and direct short films. More crucially, she worked as an assistant to the producer Martin Bregman \u2014 whose long filmography includes Serpico, Scarface, and the Denzel Washington\u2013Angelina Jolie two-hander The Bone Collector \u2014 learning the intricacies of development, film finance, foreign sales, and even Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences politicking under his mentorship.<\/p>\n Unbeknownst to one another, Smith and Williams \u2014 who had never met \u2014 set off on parallel paths to acquire the rights to Dogma. In October 2017, Smith received the phone call he had been waiting for: \u201c\u2018Kevin? Harvey Weinstein. Look, I just realized we\u2019ve got Dogma and we\u2019re not doing anything with it. This has a killer cast and all these people are still working. Would you ever think about doing a sequel or a streaming series?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI was ecstatic,\u201d Smith recalls. \u201cHarvey was like, \u2018I think we can make this happen. I\u2019ll give you a call next week.\u2019\u201d Three days later, however, the New York Times expos\u00e9<\/a> first detailing Weinstein\u2019s serial sexual predation took the wind out of Smith\u2019s sails. \u201cKevin, he had no interest in doing Dogma as a streaming series,\u201d a trusted contact at the Weinstein Company informed the director. \u201cHe was just calling to see if you were one of the sources for the New York Times. The fact that you answered the phone told him you weren\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n Around 2019, Williams heard Smith lamenting Dogma\u2019s cultural disappearance on a podcast when she had what she calls a \u201cmajor vision.\u201d \u201cI want to remaster the film. I want to put it into as many theaters as possible,\u201d Williams recalls. \u201cI felt that if I could gain control of this film, I could really put it out there and start a whole company with it. My focus was, Okay, there is value in these hills, and I\u2019m going to climb to the top if it kills me.\u201d Initially, the studios and film financiers Williams contacted were wary of the optics of doing business with Weinstein. But around two years ago, she had what she describes as a eureka deal-making moment. \u201cIt just dawned on me who would be the most perfect group of people,\u201d says Williams. \u201cI know these guys from Dubai that are money guys, not Hollywood guys. They don\u2019t care. They\u2019re foreign. They\u2019re not in the public eye. And they weren\u2019t afraid of giving him money. So I asked them to buy the film. And instead of them buying just the one film, we ended up buying all nine films that he had still available.\u201d<\/p>\n From there, Williams cold-called Smith \u2014 \u201cHi, I have Dogma. You want to have a conversation about it?\u201d is his recollection of the outreach \u2014 and set up a meeting at Hollywood\u2019s San Vicente Bungalows last fall to discuss next steps. Williams proposed the film rerelease in 2,000 theaters, and Smith imagined taking the title on tour as he had with the Jay and Silent Bob Reboot and Clerks III. At one point, the director remembers being startled when Williams\u2019s rescue dog Mona Lisa popped out of her luxury handbag. \u201cI was like, \u2018Oh, I know who Alessandra is. She\u2019s the lady with the dog in the bag,\u2019\u201d he says. \u201cI put her in a box. And that box was completely incorrect, man. Because Alessandra was the one who started all this.\u201d<\/p>\n Ultimately, Williams maneuvered to side-run a studio distribution partner. She negotiated the Dogma rerelease through a novel revenue-sharing agreement with AMC, in a pact somewhat resembling the one Taylor Swift struck with AMC and Regal to self-distribute her Eras Tour<\/a> concert film. \u201cI guess I took a risk in a way,\u201d Williams says. \u201cWhen you put a film out, you can either give a percentage to the distributor or you can pay them based on each theater they book. If you do a per-theater booking and nobody comes to the theater, you can lose a lot of money. If you do a percentage, [the theater chain] gets a percentage of that. And you\u2019ll never lose, but the percentage is high. I knew that Dogma would be huge. I felt really confident that people would come. So I went with the per-theater booking.\u201d<\/p>\n She rescued my movie about angels from the devil himself.<\/p>\n A five-time attendee of the Cannes Film Festival, Williams drew upon her acquaintance with fest director Thierry Fremaux and executive G\u00e9rald Duchaussoy<\/a> to finagle a screening of Dogma in the Cannes Classic section that is dedicated to \u201crestored masterpieces.\u201d Never mind that the overwhelming majority of its programming consists of films 50 or more years old. \u201cI just went on their website and submitted the film,\u201d Williams says. \u201cBut then I just followed up over and over, again and again, every single day. To the point where most people would think, That\u2019s really aggressive. And you would turn people off, maybe. I didn\u2019t care. I\u2019m like, I have nothing to lose.\u201d<\/p>\n Smith worried his deal with Williams was too good to be true and \u201ckept waiting for the other shoe to drop.\u201d He spent two months on due diligence around the film\u2019s financiers \u2014 worrying that Williams was some kind of double agent secretly in Weinstein\u2019s employ. \u201cI kept looking for, What am I fucking missing here? At the end, does Robert De Niro as Louis Cypher come into the room and be like, \u2018This was your dream and now you are in hell!\u2019 It feels Angel Heart<\/a>\u2013ish to some degree.\u201d<\/p>\n He\u2019s still incredulous. \u201cI tried to do this five years ago. I went out of my way! And I got connections! And this was my movie! I know the players involved! And I still couldn\u2019t make this happen.\u201d<\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/06\/38f1d14ccab4f10697de896811981bc430-dogma-kevin.rhorizontal.w700.jpg\")
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