Steven Soderbergh Pretty Much Saved Bill & Ted Face the Music

Bill & Ted Face the Music is really shaping up to be what fans have waited for all these years. The film features original actors Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter, was written by the original creators Chris Matheson and Ed Solomon, and features Dean Parisot as director. The movie also might not have happened without big time Hollywood director Steven Soderbergh (Ocean's Eleven, Erin Brockovich, Magic Mike, etc.).

In an interview with NightCap Live, Soderbergh said he was working with Solomon on Mosaic (via Collider) when he started asking about the film. Which then rolled into Soderbergh calling people up asking why the movie wasn't happening. Which then rolled into Bill & Ted Face the Music coming out this August.

When Ed and I started working on Mosaic, I knew, of course, that he had Bill & Ted in his past. And one day we were talking, and he was like, “You know, we wrote a third Bill & Ted movie.” And I said, “Well, great! Like, what’s going on with that? Can I read it?” And I read it, and I was just part of a group of people, including Scott Kroopf, the original producer, and Keanu and Alex, that really wanted to see this happen. My role was more as cheerleader than anything. The companies that own the rights to make a sequel, I called them up and said, “This script’s hilarious, why aren’t we doing this?” We found a fantastic director, Dean Parisot, who I’ve known for a long time… I’ve seen it, it’s really good, and we’re almost done, and I feel like it’s the perfect movie for people who want to feel better about what’s happening right now.

The script is eight years in the making, with a scheduled for release on August 21, 2020. THR offered this synopsis last year.

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.

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.”

[via Collider / MetalSucks]