What happened?! We thought we were just a few months away from seeing a Wyld Stallyns reunion. After years of delays and budgeting issues, Alex Winter ("Bill" S. Preston Esq.) and Keanu Reeves ("Ted" Theodore Logan) made it seem like the movie was right about to head into production.
In our last report, we leanred the movie was picked up by MGM and was in pre-production. In a new interview with Yahoo! Entertainment, Reeves, while promoting a more serious drama, Siberia, noted he was uncertain the movie would get made:
“I don’t know if it’s a reality,” Reeves cautions. “We’ve been trying for a long time to get that film made, and it still has its challenges.”
The John Wick star is quick to add that none of those challenges are creative, though. “I really love the characters, and I think we have a good story to tell. Part of it is show business stuff — financing, rights, deals. Nothing creatively.”
Last we heard, the U.S. rights were secured, so they must not have had a lot of luck shopping the film internationally, or perhaps aren't able to get the budget they'd hoped for.
It's a bummer because the movie sounds like it'd be a really fun time. THR offered this synopsis a few months ago:
Bill & Ted Face the Music will see the duo long past their days as time-traveling teenagers and now weighed down by middle age and the responsibilities of family. They’ve written thousands of tunes, but they have yet to write a good one, much less the greatest song ever written. With the fabric of time and space tearing around them, a visitor from the future warns our heroes that only their song can save life as we know it. Out of luck and fresh out of inspiration, Bill and Ted set out on a time travel adventure to seek the song that will set their world right and bring harmony in the universe as we know it. Together with the aid of their daughters, a new crop of historical figures, and some sympathetic music legends, they find much, much more than just a song.
The film was written by the original creators, Chris Matheson and Ed Solomon along with Dean Parisot directing. The script is eight years in the making.
In an interview with Yahoo in 2014, Alex Winter gave a few more hints of the plot:
“[Bill & Ted] will be 40-something and it’s all about Bill and Ted grown up, or not grown up,” Winter tells us. “It’s really sweet and really f—-ing funny.
“But it’s a Bill & Ted movie, that’s what it is. It’s for the fans of Bill & Ted. It fits very neatly in the [series]. It’s not going to feel like a reboot. The conceit is really funny: What if you’re middle-aged, haven’t really grown up and you’re supposed to have saved the world and maybe, just maybe, you kinda haven’t?”
“There’s many versions of ourselves in this movie,” he continues. “[It’s] answering the question: ‘What happened to these guys?’ They’re supposed to have done all this stuff, they weren’t the brightest bulbs on the tree, what happened 20 years later? To answer that question in a comedic way felt rich with possibility.”
So, if there are any rich financiers that are longtime readers of Metal Injection, now is the time to get in on the ground level of something big!
