Bill & Ted 3 Gets a Greenlight
They’ve been talking about making a third Bill & Ted movie since goddamn 2012 (at least). They’ve had a completed script and a director attached for at almost as long (Dean Parisot, of Galaxy Quest fame). Last year, the even revealed that the hypothetical movie would be called Bill & Ted Face the Music. We heard that budgetary issues were preventing the movie from going into production, but that was back in 2014, so at this point it’s like, “Hey dudes, what’s the delay?”
Well, according to Deadline, there is no more delay: stars Keanu Reeves (Ted) and Alex Winter (Bill) are “confirmed to reprise their roles in a third Bill & Ted movie.” MGM will distribute the film in the U.S., while a company called Bloom will sell off the international rights at this month’s prestigious Cannes Film Festival. (The report goes on to say that “The project has already piqued the interest of buyers in Cannes,” so it probably won’t be on the market long.)
Say Reeves and Winter in a joint statement:
“We couldn’t be more excited to get the whole band back together again. Chris [Matheson] and Ed [Solomon] wrote an amazing script, and with Dean at the helm we’ve got a dream team!”
Although each B&T adventure will now have had a different director, Matheson and Solomon have written all three flicks, so there should be some consistency.
The movie is in preproduction now, which presumably means it will commence filming as soon as Reeves wraps his current project, John Wick 3. That would put the movie on track for a 2019 release date, which would coincide nicely with the thirtieth anniversary of the original Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure.
Winter previously described the story for Bill & Ted Face the Music thusly:
“One of the plot points is that these two people have been crushed by the responsibility of having to write the greatest song ever written and to change the world. And they haven’t done it. So everybody is kind of like: ‘Where is the song?’ The guys have just drifted off into esoterica and lost their rock. And we go on this expedition, go into the future to find out if we wrote the song, and one future ‘us’ refuses to tell us, and another future ‘us’ blames us for their lives because we didn’t write the song, so they’re living this terrible life. In one version we’re in jail; in another we’re at some kind of highway motel and they hate us.”
Now the only question is, will the return of this long-dormant franchise be most excellent, or totally bogus? Kills me to say it, but nine times out of ten, sequels that come out after such a long resting period are usually not very good (see: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Live Free or Die Hard, Independence Day 2, Super Troopers 2, etc.). But there are exceptions. Usually they involve Sylvester Stallone, but they exist.
