It's been damn near thirty years since the release of the last film in the BILL & TED franchise, but the yearly reassurances that they're working on a third installment has kept the hope alive that Bill and Ted will return. Both Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter seem game to take part in the sequel, but it's obviously taking some time for the film to get off the ground. Ed Solomon, who co-wrote the original movies with Chris Matheson, recently spoke with Digital Spy to say that the reason for the delay behind BILL & TED 3 is simply because they want to get it right, and not cash in on nostalgia.
We have been working for almost 10 years to get this thing made; Alex Winter, Keanu Reeves, Chris Matheson, me… we have a director – Dean Parisot, who did Galaxy Quest – Steven Soderbergh is one of our producers. We have a wonderful assembly of people. We have a script that we really are proud of, that we worked very hard on, that we've done many iterations of – and we did it on spec, meaning we spent years working on it because we wanted to get it right, creatively. This is not, 'Hey let's all cash-in on the Bill & Ted thing for money' – this is the opposite. This is, 'We love these characters, they've been with us for our whole lives' – Chris and me, and Alex and Keanu – and we wanted to visit them again as middle-aged men. We thought it would be really fun, and funny, and sweet.
Solomon also addressed the loss of George Carlin, who played Rufus in both movies, saying that the new film would serve as a tribute to both Carlin and his character. "George Carlin is so deeply missed by all of us," Solomon said. "There is a… not just an homage to him, it's more than that. His absence is a part of the whole movie." Once again, the film will find Bill and Ted traveling through time, and Ed Solomon says that they'll actually interact with their past selves, as well as Rufus, thanks to footage from the first film. "There's actually a scene – one of my favourite scenes in the whole movie – where middle-aged, 50-year-old Bill and Ted return to the Circle K and see their teen selves and Rufus, and actually interact with their teenage selves, played by their actual teenage selves," Solomon said. Keanu Reeves dropped a few tidbits of his own last year:
Basically, they’re supposed to write a song to save the world and they haven’t done that yet. So the pressure of having to save the world, you know, their marriages are falling apart, their kids are kind of mad at them. But then someone comes from the future and tells them if they don’t write the song it’s just not the world now, it’s the universe. So they have to save the universe because time is breaking apart. So then elements of the past come in.
Are you still excited for a third BILL & TED film?