During the Comic-Con@Home virtual panel, Bill and Ted franchise star Alex Winter spoke on the 10-year journey of putting together the sequel, Bill & Ted Face the Music, which at one point, wasn’t in the plans.
Winter, reprising his role as Bill in the forthcoming sequel, divulged that the conversations to bring back the boys started about 10 years ago when the writers, Chris Matheson and Ed Solomon, pitched the idea for the threequel, which Winter said felt ” quite similarly to when they posed Bill and Ted Go To Hell idea.”
“They laid out this very summary version of a piss-take on Dickens of going back into your life and finding that each iteration of your life was even worse than the previous. It was pretty damn funny,” he said.
But even enthused by the idea after the meeting, there was still some skepticism.
“None of us really thought about embarking on a journey to make a third,” said Winter, as they questioned if it was worth revisiting. “No one really needs it unless it’s really great we could somehow magically hold on to the creative well enough that it maintained its integrity of that initial idea and thus began a very long road.”
Winter was joined in the discussion by Ted star Keanu Reeves, William Sadler, Samara Weaving, Brigette Lundy-Paine, director Dean Parisot, and the original writers Ed Solomon and Chris Matheson who created these characters based on an improv skit they starting doing in 1983.
“The suggestion was two teenage boys studying history and don’t know anything about history and we started playing these two guys and we just liked them instantly,” said Matheson.
Originally, the characters Bill and Ted were going to be written as part of a “skit movie,” said Matheson until later being convinced by his dad, famed screenwriter and author Richard Matheson, to make it into a film.
And while it has been almost 30 years later since the last installment, Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey, the Bill and Ted magic was still there.
“I can’t feel or laugh or do anything like the way that working on Bill or Ted does and working with Alex,” Reeves expressed. “That doesn’t exist anywhere else in the world for me. To partner up and to work on the craft side of it and then to get to play these characters that Chris and Ed created… there’s no other place that I can laugh like this.”
This latest is taunting that stakes are higher than ever for the time-traveling exploits of William “Bill” S. Preston Esq. (Winter) and Theodore “Ted” Logan (Reeves). The now-middle-age best friends set out on a new adventure to seek the song that will set their world right and bring harmony in the universe. They are helped by their daughters (Weaving and Lundy-Paine), a new batch of historical figures and a few music legends.
Originally scheduled for release August 21, Bill & Ted Face the Music was pushed back and will now be released in theaters on PVOD September 1.