‘Bill & Ted Face the Music’ continues on the legacy of the sci-fi comedy franchise, 30 years after it all began. The first film, ‘Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure’, released in 1989, gaining cult status. ‘Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey’ in 1993 came next, and though it received mixed reviews, it eventually gained popularity amongst the franchise’s followers.
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The third and latest film is a long-awaited sequel, where actor Alex Winter reprises his role as Bill and Keanu Reeves returns and Ted.
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In the first film in 1989, we meet slacker best friends Bill and Ted as high schoolers, who travel through time to collect historical figures for their history presentation. The tag line? “History is about to be rewritten by two guys who can’t spell.” The movie spurred on a movement amongst fans, causing the franchise to expand into different mediums, including a 1992 animated series — with both Winter and Reeves reprising their roles — and video games.
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In the second film, released in 1991, the lyrics of Bill and Ted’s band, Wyld Stallyns, has caused a utopian society to form in the future. A villain from the future sends evil android doubles of Bill and Ted back in time to kill the two boys and replace them.
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Marvel Comics created a one-shot comic book and released it at the same time that the sequel released. It included deleted scenes. The comic was so successful that Marvel decided to commission an entire spin-off series titled ‘Bill & Ted’s Comic Book’, which ran for 12 issues.
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News of a third film in the franchise emerged 17 years later, in 2010, and the draft for ‘Bill & Ted Face the Music’ was reportedly done in 2011. Production, however, only began in 2019.
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In the latest film, the middle-aged Bill and Ted are dealing with normal crises, like their failing marriages and fussy children, but they’re also dealing with the world ending. But, when a figure from the future tells them they have to compose a song to save the universe, Bill and Ted decide to travel in time in order to steal the song from their older selves.
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So far, critics are liking the long-awaited sequel to the slacker series. At time of writing, it has an 81 per cent critic approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes and a 75 per cent audience score. New York Magazine critic Alison Willmore wrote: “The most successful quality of the film is how close it keeps in spirit and haphazard style to the first two instalments, and how it feels proudly unstuck in time.”
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The ‘Bill & Ted’ franchise is known for its fairly low budgets. The first film cost $10 million to make and made $40.5 million at the box office. The second film, less successful than the first, only made $38 million at the US box office, compared to its $20 million budget. Finally, ‘Bill & Ted Face the Music’ set producers back by $25 million. On what they want audiences to get out of it, both Reeves and Winter seemed to want to give their viewers a break from the real world. “Just to laugh, to enjoy the ride, to, you know, feel good, feel positive, and share that, spread that around,” Reeves told NPR. Winter added: “There’s a lot of whimsy, and I think an hour and a half of genuine, open-hearted, innocent whimsy may not be the worst thing for people.”
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