Though it occasionally pings the news radar, there has been very little obvious forward motion on a third** Bill & Ted **film. But according to Bill S. Preston Esq. himself, AKA Alex Winter, that’s not for want of trying – and they have a script they like.
The basic premise for the new film appears to be in keeping with what Keanu Reeves and Winter have previously said, in that it finds an older Bill and Ted stuck trying to live up to their destiny.
“It’s a** Bill & Ted** movie, that’s what it is. It’s for the fans of Bill & Ted. It fits very neatly in the series. It’s not going to feel like a reboot,” Winter tells Yahoo. “The conceit is really funny: What if you’re middle-aged, haven’t really grown up and you’re supposed to have saved the world and maybe, just maybe, you kinda haven’t?”
Along the way in the new script, we will meet various versions of the lead doofuses, figuring out exactly where they've gone wrong. Winter says that the main team – the actors plus writers Ed Solomon and Chris Matheson – have been hashing out ideas for years and actually hoped to get the movie ready out of the public glare, a difficult thing to pull off in this leaky, insta-news era.
“Now we’re having to build this thing in public, which is fine. I just feel bad the fans have to get dragged through this long, boring, protracted process,” he says. “I guess about four years ago we had an idea together that we thought was pretty great.
“It took time to construct the idea, it took Chris and Ed time to build the first draft. Then we put a producer together and got a director (Galaxy Quest’s Dean Parisot). We’ve been working on drafts for the last couple of years. The script’s been finished for a while, but comedy is so specific. We’re in that world where producers are on, financiers are on and we’re just working and reworking the script.”
So we’ll still have to wait to see if they can get it to screens, but from the sounds of it, it might be worth our patience.