A quarter of a century ago, it seemed like nobody wanted Dogma. Kevin Smith’s subversive comedy about a pair of disgraced angels (played by Ben Affleck and Matt Damon) was met with fierce protests soon after it debuted at the Cannes Film Festival. Writer-director Smith, riding high off his 1997 romcom Chasing Amy, received 300,000 pieces of hate mail, including several “bona fide death threats”. Religious campaign group the Catholic League picketed outside cinemas. Critics also sharpened their knives, with The Independent’s Gilbert Adair among those who crucified the film. “Nothing, absolutely nothing, not a single idea, not a shot, not a camera movement, not a performance, not a gesture, not a gag, nothing at all, I repeat, works in this movie,” he sneered.
Some of us, though, couldn’t get enough of the film, which celebrates its 25th anniversary on 12 November. I was a Sunday School-attending teenager when I first stumbled across Dogma on late-night television, and I was hooked from the moment Linda Fiorentino’s beleaguered abortion counsellor Bethany set upon Alan Rickman’s Metatron, the flaming voice of God, with a fire extinguisher. He had appeared in her bedroom to recruit her on a quest to stop Bartleby and Loki, Affleck and Damon’s fallen angels, from making it to a church in New Jersey. There they intend to use a doctrinal loophole known as a “plenary indulgence” to wash away all their sins and sneak back into heaven. What they don’t realise is that in doing so they’ll disprove the fundamental concept of God’s omnipotence and immediately wipe out all of existence.
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The real star, though, was Smith’s script, which plays out like a pop-culture-infused catechism. It uses a technicolour version of the Catholic belief system to bring to life a vigorous moral debate, as when Bartleby and Loki hand out righteous vengeance to the board of a clearly Disney-inspired cartoon company they accuse of raising up a false idol, Mooby the Golden Calf. Last year, Affleck recalled reading the screenplay in an interview with Vanity Fair, saying: “Kevin’s very focused on the written word. He’s got a cadence that he likes, but I thought it was a really creative, interesting script. It was a sort of imagining of Catholicism in a very literal sense, and also in a comic sense. I was thinking my kids would actually like that; they have that sense of humour… Kevin’s always had the sense of humour of an adolescent!”
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The controversy that surrounded the film’s release didn’t actually do anything to harm its box-office performance, and may well have helped it to rake in $31m (£24m) worldwide, easily recouping its $10m (£7m) budget. Yet 25 years on, Dogma is not available on any streaming service and last received a physical release when it came out on Blu-ray in 2008. DVDs and VHS copies now change hands for inflated sums online. The reason the film is so hard to find is a direct result of all those Catholic League protests years ago. They kicked up such a fuss that Disney, which at the time owned Miramax, decided they wanted no part of its release. To solve the problem, Weinstein and his brother Bob personally bought the rights to Dogma and set up a distribution deal with Lionsgate. The Weinsteins continued to hold the rights for years but refused to do anything with them, which led Smith to joke of Weinstein in 2022: “He’s holding it hostage. My movie about angels is owned by the devil himself.”
But there is reason to be optimistic. A few weeks ago, Smith revealed during an appearance on podcast That Hashtag Show that the movie rights have been bought by a new distribution company, and plans are afoot to re-release the film in 2025. He went on to say that Dogma could finally get a streaming release, too, as well as new physical versions to accompany a cinema run in the new year. Most excitingly for fans, though, was his suggestion that he could – now that his film is out of Weinstein’s clutches – return to the world of Dogma to tell new tales on a Biblical scale.
