At long last, the third installment in the Bill & Ted franchise is out in the world. Bill & Ted Face the Music is showing now in select theaters and available digitally, giving fans what is likely the final chapter of Bill and Ted's saga. What many fans already know is that it took over a decade to get to this point. How different is the finished product from the initial idea, though?
Warning: The following contains spoilers for Bill & Ted Face the Music. If you haven't seen the movie yet, just drop whatever you're doing and check it out now. Look no further than GameSpot's review of the film to explain why.
As it turns out, a lot of the movie you see on screen dates back to the first meeting between stars Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter, and writers Ed Solomon and Chris Matheson back in 2008. "The starting point was always the same," Matheson told GameSpot. "It hasn't worked out, it didn't go the way they were told it was going to go when they were 17 or 18 years old. That [much] we knew. It had to be that way."
Additionally, he revealed that the idea of sending Bill and Ted into the future was an early concept. "The basic thing of traveling into the future to steal the song from themselves we hit on that pretty early and those scenes where they go to amateur night, and they go to Dave Grohl's house, and they go to prison, and they visit the old men--those scenes are remarkably similar to what we wrote in in 2010," he said.
However, quite a bit evolved over the years, including the entire subplot about the duo's daughters. "The girls traveling along, having their own journey that was something that came later--and picking up historical figures themselves," Matheson noted. "Dennis, the robot was something that came later."
What's more, the stakes and ending of the movie were originally not as grand. "Our original ending was a much smaller ending, the ending that Chris and I originally wrote," Solomon added. "It was very personal and very small. But the other thing that evolved over the course of the writing was the stakes of the world--saving reality and all that--that grew, the more we rewrote it."
It may have taken 12 years and a number of revisions, now Bill and Ted Face the Music is real, at long last, and is available to watch right now. If you've seen it and still have some questions, check out our ending explainer.
