Originally published January 25, 2018. Updated April 15, 2018.
Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey was released 27 years ago. Just let that sink in for a minute. Now imagine that for a third of that time, original writers Ed Solomon and Chris Matheson had been trying to put together a sequel, Bill & Ted Face the Music. They’d probably have a lot to talk about, and that’s just what Solomon has been doing with Digital Spy, revealing details about the status of the script, and how they intend to honour George Carlin’s Rufus, who sadly passed away in 2008.
Bill & Ted Face the Music will reunite us with Bill S. Preston Esquire (Alex Winter) and Ted Theodore Logan (Keanu Reeves) as middle aged family men, but according to Solomon, their journey back to the big screen has been more difficult than a game of chess with the grim reaper.
“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 spoke at length about how the script would incorporate Rufus, with Bill & Ted travelling back in time in order to interact with their young selves and George Carlin’s character using footage from Excellent Adventure.
“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.”
Finally, Solomon went on to discuss the frustrations in getting their script the greenlight, citing the financiers desire for a reboot with teenage kids rather than a sequel, and the worry that because the original was a cult hit, there really wouldn’t be the audience to justify the expenditure.
SEE ALSO: Preview of Bill & Ted’s Most Excellent Adult Coloring Book
You can read the full article over at Digital Spy, but what do you think? Will we ever see the further adventures of Bill & Ted, or will it be appropriately lost in time forever more?
