Late last summer there was a brief flurry of excitement as both Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter confirmed that an excellent third Bill and Ted film was in the pipeline. There's been a bogus lack of news since, but Keanu has just told MTV that the first draft of the Bill and Ted 3 script is due next month. And he also teased a vague plot detail or two.
Last we heard, Reeves was musing on Bill S Preston and Ted Theodore Logan approaching fifty, while Winter was assuring us that the project won't be cynical, but "the straight up, most surprising take on where Bill and Ted would be right now if we stopped back in on them." No cop out next-generation stuff here (team Ghostbusters, take note).
"The fellas [original writers Chris Matheson and Ed Solomon] went away and cooked it up," says Reeves, "but I don't know yet what happened when they put the elements together."
What he does know, is that the mooted film will pick up from the end of Bogus Journey, when the Wyld Stallyns victory at the San Dimas Battle of the Bands looked set to have put the planet firmly on the path to Utopia. Sadly not so. "When we last got together, part of it was that Bill and Ted were supposed to have written the song that saved the world," Reeves explains, "and it hasn't happened. So they've now become kind of possessed by trying to do that. Then there's an element of time and they have to go back."
All involved are treading carefully around the sad issue of George Carlin no longer being around to play Rufus (re-casting him would be "horrible", Winter promised last year), and there are no clues yet as to whether we can expect to revisit any other previous encounters, like the Historical Babes, or Death, or Station.
But more bodacious info should be revealed before too long, as Keanu turns and points to camera, and addresses Matheson and Solomon directly: "The first draft is due in six weeks. No pressure, guys!"