Bill and Ted Face the Music is going the non-traditional route and releasing in the US on VOD and select theaters on September 1. There’s currently no word on whether the threequel will reach UK cinemas and VOD services concurrently.
The movie, which stars Keanue Reeves as Theodore "Ted" Logan and Alex Winter as William "Bill" S. Preston Esq., has been delayed several times due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. It was initially slated for August 21, then pushed back a week to August 28. Now, it'll release simultaneously in select theaters in the US and on-demand.
Bill and Ted 3 follow the bodacious bros as they struggle with the perils of aging, fathering their teenage daughters (Samara Weaving as Bill's daughter is pure brilliance and I'm always here for Bridgette Lundy-Paine), and reckoning with the idea that no one believes they ever time travelled and visited heaven and hell. Well, good thing aliens show up to ask them for help, and give them the chance to remind us all that being excellent to each other is a universal concept.
According to THR, smaller films like Bill and Ted 3 can't take a staggered launch approach as cinemas reopen worldwide, like Christopher Nolan's Tenet or Disney's Mulan may ultimately do this fall. Therefore, Orion (the studio carrying Bill and Ted 3) and the filmmakers "came to the conclusion that they had to alter their plans in order to give consumers a choice they feel comfortable with, and that a one-size-fits-all approach is no longer viable." It's an interesting solution to an ever-changing and unprecedented problem, and one that may serve as a guideline for future small film releases.
Bill and Ted Face the Music features on the new cover of our sister publication Total Film. “Working on that material [1989's Excellent Adventure], and getting to play it, I thought it was pretty special,” Reeves tells Total Film when he considers if he’d anticipated the audience love and the possibility of a trilogy from that first film. “I certainly, at that time, had no expectation that you and I would be speaking here today!”
Winter agrees: “Yeah, I mean, the very first movie was made by a bunch of young, scrappy people – and pretty independently, and we didn’t really know what to expect. And frankly, neither did the producers. We knew it was an idiosyncratic film, so we didn’t really know where it was going to go...”
Inside the new issue of Total Film – which hits shelves real and digital from this Friday, July 24 – Reeves, Winter, Lundy-Paine, Weaving, Parisot, Solomon and co-writer Chris Matheson talk in-depth about the long-awaited threequel.
