It is hard to think of a more good-natured series thanBill and Ted. The final entry in the franchise trilogy, the recently releasedBill & Ted Face the Music, kept spirits high with a breezy new adventure that ended on a high note with the whole of humankind literally coming together to jam out to the most popular song ever written. In an interview with Collider, the co-writer of the film, Ed Solomon, revealed that the original ending for the film left audiences on a much downer note.
“Our first draft that we wrote in 2010, the ending of the movie was really small. We had a scene at the beginning where 20 years ago they had put $100,000 down to rent theRose Bowlfor their triumphant 20th Reunion Tour, and when we meet them in the movie when it opens they have sold literally zero tickets. We had a scene where they went to negotiate with the guy to try and get their money back and the guy was like, ‘No, you’re stuck’. The whole movie was moving towards this ending, and the guys were thinking, ‘Well obviously it must be at the Rose Bowl. Obviously we’re gonna fill the Rose Bowl with this triumphant song, we just don’t know how.'”
“And the whole movie happens like it happens [in Face the Music], they go into the future, their lives get worse and worse, and they arrive at the Rose Bowl and it’s empty. There’s no instruments there. It didn’t happen. They failed. And they go home and they sit down in their living room, and you’re like one minute from the end of the movie. And they realize they failed, they feel like they failed, and then they hear music coming from the other room and they walk in and they look and see their kids and they realize it was never them, and the movie’s over.”
Wow. Talk about upturning expectations. After two movies worth of insistingBill and Ted’s musicwas going to change the world,Face the Musicwould have revealed that it was the duo’s daughters all along who were supposed to be the chosen ones.
Interestingly, almost the exact same storytelling ‘twist’ featured in another franchise recently, inTerminator: Dark Fate, where it was revealed thatJohn Connor was not the chosen savior of humanity, but rather the savior was a new female character introduced in the film. That revelation did not go down well with fans, and theBill and Tedone is unlikely to have done any better. Thankfully, the final act ofFace the Musicwas changed to something much more hopeful, that was also a satisfying payoff from the previous two films in the series.
Directed by Dean Parisot and written by Chris Matheson and Ed Solomon,Bill & Ted Face the Musicfeatures a lead cast of Keanu Reeves, Alex Winter, Anthony Carrigan, Kid Cudi, Brigette Lundy-Paine and Samara Weaving. The film is now in theaters and onpremium video on demand. This story originally appeared atCollider.
