Bill & Ted screenwriter Ed Solomon confirmed that the character of Death, introduced in Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey has been written into the planned third film in the franchise, Bill & Ted Face the Music. In response to a Twitter question asking if the Grim Reaper will be featured in the film, Solomon responded by saying:
“Bill CRUSHED it as Death. And we laughed a lot writing him in BT3 – so let’s hope it’s something that happens”
William Sadler, who portrayed Grim in Bogus Journey seems game to come back, stating:
“Have scythe, will travel.”
Face the Music will see Winter and Reeves play middle-aged versions of Bill and Ted, who are now family men rather than young aspiring musicians. In a recent interview with Digital Spy, Solomon talked about bringing back these characters after all this time:
“This is not, ‘Hey let’s all cash-in on the Bill & Ted thing for money’ – this is the opposite. This is, ‘We love these characters, they’ve been with us for our whole lives’ – Chris and me, and Alex and Keanu – and we wanted to visit them again as middle-aged men. We thought it would be really fun, and funny, and sweet. “
Solomon also talked about the absence of the late George Carlin’s Rufus in the film:
“There’s actually a scene – one of my favorite scenes in the whole movie – where middle-aged, 50-year-old Bill and Ted return to the Circle K and see their teen selves and Rufus, and actually interact with their teenage selves, played by their actual teenage selves…They return to that scene at the Circle K when Bill and Ted first meet themselves, only now they’re watching their younger selves and looking at the exuberance and joy that they had at that time in their lives. And they see Rufus, they see George Carlin….There’s also a character in the movie named Kelly, which is George’s daughter’s name, who has a very significant role in the journey, so George is a deep, deep part of it.”
Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure did not have a huge US release, and while Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey had a significant amount of hype around it (MTV even aired a special film premiere special), neither were huge financial successes at the box office, so it’s still unclear if a studio would be willing to pick this film up. With bigger budget films like Bright and The Cloverfield Paradox being produced for streaming services like Netflix, however, Face the Music could very well premiere in our living-rooms.
