Anybody who’s a fan of the works of Kevin Smith in general is probably a fan of Dogma. That is, of course, assuming they’ve seen it. The movie has been one of the hardest to watch pieces of Smith’s filmography, but the movie recently made a triumphant return to the Cannes Film Festival, and fans showed up for it.
Back in 1999, Smith’s film Dogma screened at the Cannes Film Festival. And now in 2025, as part of the Cannes Classic series, the movie screened there once again. Smith recently regained the rights to the movie, and it will see a theatrical re-release next month. The director says this second time at Cannes was even better than the first. He posted to Instagram saying…
For the second time in my life, 26 years after the first opportunity, I got to watch #dogma on one of the screens at the legendary #palaisdesfestivals - and it played even better in 2025 than our 1999 screening!
It has to feel good to have Dogma screening again, and to see and hear audiences reacting to it this way. The movie has had a complicated history, as it was the one part of Smith’s filmography that he did not have the rights to, preventing him from releasing it on streaming platforms or making sequels.
Dogma is the highest-grossing of Smith’s View Askewnarverse movies, but the writer and director were unable to do anything with it over the last two and a half decades. Smith has made sequels to Clerks and a sequel to Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back in the last few years and has been working on a sequel to Mallrats for years, but Dogma has been a place he could not go.
The rights to the film were owned by Harvey Weinstein. Smith had revealed previously that Weinstein wanted several million dollars to sell the movie back to him. Due to Weinstein currently serving a prison sentence for sexual assault, Smith was not inclined to give him money.
Smith now has the rights to Dogma back, with whatever money that changed hands likely going to pay restitution for Weisnetein’s victims. Smith recently took the movie on a short road show, but says the response at Cannes even surpassed that. He continued…
The audience was passionate and loud, cheering along with the flick like they did during the Resurrection Tour, and about half of them had never seen the movie before.
Considering that Dogma is over 25 years old and hasn’t been widely available streaming or on other home media recently, it’s not a shock that so many people had never seen it. And we don’t need to take Smith’s word for how much the audience loved it. You can hear it all below.
Smith has already revealed he is working on a potential Dogma sequel, and based on this response, that’s certainly not a surprise. With fans cheering like this for the original, a sequel looks like it could be quite popular., And considering how many people have only just seen it for the first time, they won’t even need to wait 25 years for it.
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