Bill & Ted will face the music sooner than everyone thought. The long-awaited sci-fi comedy franchise threequel, titled Bill & Ted Face the Music, experienced a circuitous process in getting made, eventually setting a release date that serendipitously avoided the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, auspiciously enough, said release has been shifted to an earlier date.
Bill & Ted Face the Music is now set to air-guitar and time-travel its way to theaters on August 14, one week earlier than its previous August 21 release date, reports Deadline. The move occurs over a year after the March 2019 announcement of the Orion and United Artists-distributed film’s original release date, which was made well before the array of horrors that would come to define 2020—specifically the coronavirus release date delays—were known.
Interestingly, the release date shift of Bill & Ted Face the Music is hardly an isolated occurrence at the moment, with several high-profile blockbusters now in the midst of mass migrations—in both directions—from their pandemic-pushed release dates. Indeed, James Bond outing No Time to Die moved to Nov. 20, five days earlier than previously scheduled. Additionally, DC cinematic sequel Wonder Woman 1984 lassoed itself from Aug. 14 to Oct. 2, and director Christopher Nolan’s Tenet—which had been resolute in the face of coronavirus shutdowns—will move two weeks from its Jul. 17 date to Jul. 31. However, in the most dramatic recent example, Warner Bros. kaiju crossover sequel Godzilla vs. Kong was moved six months from Nov. 20 to May 21, 2021.
The threequel will revive the popular film franchise of teenage time-travelling Southern California metalheads represented by 1989’s Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure and 1991’s Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey, which even spawned Saturday morning cartoon Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventures, which ran for two seasons from 1990-1991, first on CBS, then Fox. Thus, Face the Music will see Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves reprise their titular roles as Bill S. Preston Esq. and Ted “Theodore” Logan, respectively, nearly thirty years after we last saw them onscreen. However, the twist is that they’re still hapless wannabe rock stars who—now middle-aged—have yet to fulfill their destiny of writing the song that brings about global balance for a peaceful future. Now, besides a reunion with Bogus Journey’s Death (William Sadler), the duo’s latest trip in the iconic time-traversing phone booth will see them joined by a new generation in Bill’s daughter, Thea Preston (Samara Weaving), and Ted’s daughter, Billie Logan (Brigette Lundy-Paine).
Bill & Ted Face the Music was directed by Dean Parisot, (Galaxy Quest, Red 2, Fun with Dick and Jane), who worked off a script by returning franchise writers Chris Matheson and Ed Solomon. The project languished for several years in pre-production purgatory, even as it was championed by the star power of an enthusiastic Reeves. However, momentum started to build in 2018 when it was successfully shopped at the Cannes Film Festival. While the film has been hyped for quite a while, its very first trailer arrived this past week.
