Scheduled for 6 p.m., the panel was set to be one of the highlights of the weekend before it turned into quite the snafu, but fortunately for fans, the writer/actor/director is thoughtful and engaging even when he's really late and doesn't speak for as long as he was supposed to.
Here's what happened.
The wait was long
Smith did not appear onstage until an hour after the scheduled start time. It wasn’t as long a wait as for a “Clerks” sequel, but it was a very long wait nonetheless.The event moderator tried to placate the crowd with humor
At 6:30, when Smith was 30 minutes behind schedule, the moderator made his first announcement about the lateness —which was not exactly news at that point — and tried to soften the blow by joking about the restive audience. “You guys sound like the 5-0 just hit your stash,” he said. This got some laughs. He went on to say that Smith was still signing autographs and that Smith is devoted to the fans and never one to let them down. Some attendees grumbled about devotion to making money.The moderator sort of canceled the event — maybe?
At 7 p.m., when the panel was then an hour behind schedule, the moderator came out to apologize again and update the crowd. “It’s a good news, bad news kind of thing,” he said. A man somewhere in the back shouted, “Give us the bad news first.” This went unacknowledged. The moderator went on to say that because of time constraints and commitments beyond anyone’s control, Smith would not have time do the panel because he had another engagement back in Los Angeles later that night. “The plane’s waiting on the tarmac for him now,” he said.The moderator promised that Smith would come up to say hi before leaving, but there would not be a full event. “It’s going to be a quickie, a drive-by, whatever you want to call it.” There would, however, be staff distributing tickets that attendees could redeem on Sunday as a consolation prize for the kind of-sort of canceled event. “I don’t know what the tickets will get you. Nobody knows yet. It’s fluid right now. It’s fluid, like Washington, D.C., math.”
Most of the crowd in the front half of the ballroom left at that point. Many of those still waiting in the back, full of hope and expectation, moved to the front.
And then the cancellation was canceled!
Shortly after the promise of a drive-by quickie, as the moderator led the crowd in a chant of “Snoo-chie-boo-chie,” sometimes modified to “hope-ful-ly,” Smith took the stage.“Kids, how are you doing?” he said to much cheering. “Thank you so much. The older I get, the more meaningful this stuff gets. I don’t want to depress anybody, but there’s less life in front of me than there has been behind me.”

Filmmaker, podcaster and geek icon Kevin Smith during his brief panel at Phoenix Fan Fusion 2025 on Saturday.
Benjamin Leatherman
Smith took one question, and he took it for the next 25 minutes
Smith asked for questions, and he called on a man in the audience who shouted his question: “Can you talk about the ‘Dogma’ sequel?”For the rest of the session, Smith addressed this question, sometimes directly and sometimes in a meandering fashion.
Twenty-five years of ‘Dogma’
Smith discussed the 25th anniversary rerelease of “Dogma,” which was one of this year’s Cannes Classics selections. “That’s fun,” Smith said of being invited back to Cannes. “Like, how fucking neat. Like the weirdest, wonderful victory lap for something I did a long time ago.” He spoke about how meaningful the return was to Cannes with his wife and his daughter, Harley, who was there the first time “but in utero and stuff” for their Cannes trip in 1999.Smith had thought about a ‘Dogma’ sequel before, but issues with rights to the movie prevented the possibility of any rerelease, sequel or spin-off until Alessandra Williams “rescued this movie from the devil himself — clench your assholes, kids — Harvey Weinstein.” Weinstein had previously owned the rights to “Dogma” and a number of other films, rights he sold when, according to Smith, “(Weinstein) was going back to court and needed legal money.”
A new perspective on life
“I used to be really shaped by what people on the internet would say,” Smith said of his life before his heart attack in February 2018. Living through and recovering from that ordeal drastically changed his perspective and motivations. “After I almost died, I really didn’t give a fuck anymore.”How the ‘Dogma’ sequel will differ from the original
“‘Dogma’ is a movie that only an altar boy could have made,” Smith said. “An altar boy who would giggle every time the priest said, ‘Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.’” When he wrote the script, Smith was an irreverent, though still believing, Catholic. He compared his approach to that of David dancing before the city in the Old Testament. “You’re supposed to celebrate,” Smith said of religious observance. “It’s the celebration of the Mass, but everyone always seems to be mourning it. And I just wanted to invent what I thought would be a better version of church. ‘Dogma’ was my idea of a Sunday service with anal jokes.”Twenty-five years on, though, his perspective on the faith differs from that of his younger years. “The last 25 years of my life have been unfettered by the cosmology I was fed as a kid,” Smith said. “I may have given up the organization, but I didn’t really give up the tenets of the faith.”
The “Dogma” sequel, therefore, “ain’t going to be fed by the same ethos” as the first film. Whereas he wrote and directed the first film while still in his 20s, he plans to draw on his later experience to imbue the new film with a different perspective. “What it lacks in pure faith,” Smith said of the script he is currently working on, “it makes up for in pure cleverness.”