When Bill and Ted Face the Music hits theaters on Friday, the film’s writers — Ed Solomon and Chris Matheson, who also created the characters and wrote the previous two films — say they think the story is over for Bill S. Preston, Esquire, and Ted “Theodore” Logan. After nearly 30 years getting a third installment made, the pair have said everything they have to say about the characters that they first brought to the screen in 1989’s Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. Like another beloved time-travel franchise, Back to the Future, it’s almost impossible to imagine the movies without Solomon, Matheson, Keanu Reeves, and Alex Winter involved.
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In an entertainment landscape dominated by nostalgic content, sequels, reboots, and revivals, it’s easy to think that if Bill and Ted Face the Music becomes a big hit, Orion and MGM could ask for more. But while Alex Winter joked with reporters during a press conference that you never know what might happen in another thirty years, the writers were more direct.
“We’re good to stand down at this point, and so we told the Bill and Ted story, and it’s complete, I think,” Solomon told ComicBook.com.
“Three is the magic number, I think. Beginning, middle, and end,” Matheson added. “This is the end.”
Following the surprise blockbuster that was 1989’s Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, Winter and Reeves returned to their title roles for 1991’s Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey. Since then, the pair — as well as writers Ed Solomon and Chris Matheson — have consistently had to field questions about the possibility of a third movie featuring the characters, a pair of slackers who discover that in the future, world peace is achieved as a result of the music of Wyld Stallyns, a rock band they founded in their garage.
In the first film, a time-traveler named Rufus (George Carlin) allowed the pair to use a time machine that gave them a leg up on passing an important high school history presentation. The second film saw them killed and sent to Hell, where they had to defeat the Grim Reaper in order to be revived.
In the third film, Bill & Ted Face the Music, the now-middle-aged Bill and Ted have not yet written the song that kickstarts their world-altering careers, and the future is getting anxious. As reality starts to unravel, there is a literal ticking clock on Bill and Ted to fulfill their destiny. The pair elect to time-travel to the future — or more accurately various alternate futures — to steal the song from their future selves and set the timestream on the right path. Hal Landon, Jr. returns as Ted’s father, Amy Stoch as his stepmother (who was Bill’s stepmother in the first film), and The Flash veteran William Sadler reprises his role as Death, the Grim Reaper who is really bad at basically every game he tries to play — but pretty killer on bass.
Solomon and Matheson wrote Bill & Ted Face the Music, which was directed by Galaxy Quest‘s Dean Parisot.
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