Bill & Ted Face The Music released at home last year, and Alex Winter explained how the creative team came to that decision. Over the last year and change, we’ve all seen what the health situation has done to the entertainment industry and beyond. A lot of companies had some serious decisions on their hands when it came to theatrical releases. A couple of films like Tenet decided to make a go of it and quickly found out that things were not back to normal. Other family movies went the VOD route and saw big returns. Winter said on Twitter that they weighed all their options and decided to forgo the big theatrical release in favor of at-home. In the team’s estimation, it just wasn’t worth the risk. (Especially when the possibility of having the movie pushed again for some other reason loomed in the background.) The star is always thoughtful on Twitter and provided some insight into how these decisions get made.
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I feel for movies releasing theatrically right now given the ferocity of the Delta variant. We agonized over getting BT3 out on schedule, which meant streaming only and sadly no theatrical. But our option was to wait a year and a year later we would certainly have pushed again.
— Alex Winter (@Winter) August 1, 2021
“I feel for movies releasing theatrically right now given the ferocity of the Delta variant. We agonized over getting BT3 out on schedule, which meant streaming only and sadly no theatrical. But our option was to wait a year and a year later we would certainly have pushed again,” Winter explained. “I only saw it once in a regular theater as a rough cut in a test screening. Was great to hear the audience’s response. Our ‘premiere’ was at a drive-in so no real audience interaction. Keanu and most of the cast and crew never saw it with an audience. Will screen when we can.”
Winter previously spoke to Comicbook.com’s Alex Winter about the movie and the emotional core of the series. “Be excellent to each other” isn’t just a catchphrase.
“When we made the first movie, we weren’t thinking about it in grand terms at all, because there was nothing grand about the first movie in any capacity,” Winter said. “It was a very low budget film, made without any grand expectations. It got shelved, as I think most people know, and we didn’t expect it to get released. So it was bought in a fire sale by Nelson Entertainment, and we played the characters, we really enjoyed them, but we didn’t think of them as pop cultural figures, but it became part of the zeitgeist almost instantly when it was released. And suddenly this idea of ‘be excellent to each other’ was everywhere. It was on t-shirts, and it was on TV. And you would hear people saying it.”
Would you like to see Keanu Reeves and Winter back together again? Let us know down in the comments!
