In the preview, Bill S. Preston, Esq. (Winter) and Theodore “Ted” Logan (Reeves) are still best friends after all these years. (For anyone who’s lost track, it’s been 29 years since the second film in the Bill & Ted series, 1991’s Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey.) Our heroes have now grown up, had children and still play music (even though their gigs are at a bar that uses $2 tacos to lure in customers). But throughout all that, Bill and Ted have still hoped to write a song that would finally unite all of humankind.
And as we see in the new trailer, visitors from the future tell the Wyld Stallyns pair that one of their songs can bring harmony to the universe, so Bill and Ted decide to embark on another journey. They choose to time travel to the future and steal the song from themselves, rather than actually write it themselves.
“Bill, we’ve spent our whole life trying to write the song that will unite the world,” Ted says in the promotional clip. “Why can’t we just go to the future when we have written it?”
“And take it from ourselves!” Bill chimes in. “How is that stealing if we’re stealing it from ourselves, dude?”
Dean Parisot (Galaxy Quest) directed the film, and Chris Matheson and Ed Solomon, who wrote the first two entries in the trilogy, returned to the Bill & Ted universe to pen the screenplay. This time around, Bill and Ted will be joined by their daughters, who are portrayed by Samara Weaving (Hollywood) and Brigette Lundy-Paine (Bombshell).
Rumors swirled about 10 years ago that Reeves and Winter would reunite for another Bill & Ted movie. And back in 2013, Reeves teased that it film was in the works. Even though he coyly told Today that he shouldn’t talk about it, he did say they had started working on a script.
“I think it’s pretty surreal, playing Bill & Ted at 50,” he said. “But we have a good story in that. You can see the life and joy in those characters, and I think the world can always use some life and joy.”
Solomon told Digital Spy in 2018 that the script isn’t a reboot, so much as it is revisiting the beloved characters they worked on years earlier.
“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,” he said. “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.”
William Sadler (The Shawshank Redemption), Hal Landon Jr. (The Artist) and Amy Stoch (Dallas) will be returning to the Bill & Ted franchise. The film’s stacked cast also includes Scott Mescudi (a.k.a. Kid Cudi), Kristen Schaal (30 Rock and Flight of the Conchords), Holland Taylor (Legally Blonde), Jillian Bell (Inherent Vice), Anthony Carrigan (Barry), Jayma Mays (Glee), Erinn Hays (Kevin Can Wait) and Beck Bennett (Saturday Night Live).
Bill & Ted Face the Music is slated to premiere on August 21. Whether it will get a video-on-demand or theater premiere remains to be seen.
Newsweek did not receive comment from Reeves or Winter by the time of publication.
