Remember before Keanu Reeves was a badass in The Matrix he was that doofus in a ’80s comedy about time travel that probably isn’t as good as you remember it? You know, Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure! It was totally excellent and featured life lessons to live by like “Be Excellent to Each Other” and “Party On Dudes” as eloquently delivered by Abraham Lincoln in a high school auditorium. Yeah, it was totally excellent and probably ruined your ability to pronounce “Socrates” correctly.
The film was so popular that it also got a sequel and children’s cartoon, and now 23 years in the making, people are still talking about Bill & Ted 3, even though George Carlin is dead and you’re not quite sure what happened to Alex Winter.
Now Winter has revealed additional plot details for the third film to Yahoo, saying the characters will be all-grown up and may even cross paths with multiple versions of themselves across different timelines.
“But it’s a Bill & Ted movie, that’s what it is. It’s for the fans of Bill & Ted. It fits very neatly in the [series]. It’s not going to feel like a reboot. The conceit is really funny: What if you’re middle-aged, haven’t really grown up and you’re supposed to have saved the world and maybe, just maybe, you kinda haven’t,” Winter said.
Of course this film probably isn’t about to happen any time soon, and to see why, let’s take a trip back in time in our traveling phone booth to 2011 when Reeves and Winter both said the film’s script was completed, or when in 2012 Red 2 director Dean Parisot was attached to direct, or more recently in 2013 when Keanu Reeves talked about the same development hell that plagues any time traveling stoner movie, in which he jokingly said “darkness” and a “conspiracy theory” were turning Bill & Ted 3 into the equivalent of getting Apocalypse Now or Heaven’s Gate made.
Inevitably this movie will get made, and I’ll inevitably rewatch that first movie and understand why it was too new to be in the ’80s comedy classic canon and too old to get the misplaced ’90s nostalgia heaped on Space Jam and Hocus Pocus.
As part of production for Magic Mike XXL, the sequel to Steven Soderbergh’s surprise hit Magic Mike, People’s Sexiest Man Alive Channing Tatum has posted a contest to his Facebook page announcing the chance for 10 people to become extras on the film and watch the cast perform some of the elaborate dance routines they didn’t get to perform the first time around, this not being a secret art house film any longer. The contest sounds simple enough; all you have to do is make a video explaining why you’re the biggest Magic Mike fan and deserve the chance to be a part of it and share it with #MagicMikeContest. But you may want to check out all the legalese on the Rules and Regulation page, and you only have until Monday at Noon PT to enter. In other news, the film recently cast Jada Pinkett Smith in a role that was originally intended for a man. She’ll be joining new cast member Amber Heard, Tatum, Alex Pettyfer and Gabriel Iglesias, but no Matthew McConaughey.
Terry Gilliam claims the financing has finally come together for him to make a meta Don Quixote movie about a man struggling to make a movie about Don Quixote. The AV Club reported on the story back in August, and they now have news that John Hurt will be starring in the film when it begins production next year. However, the production process has been so complicated for so long that he may finally abandon the project altogether or end up recasting yet again.
Girls star Lena Dunham is producing a documentary about a tailor shop in New York that tailors suits for LGBTQ customers. The store is called Bindle & Keep is based in Brooklyn, and the documentary will examine “the significance of the process for a set of customers with complex gender identities,” Vanity Fair reports. The film also has Girls producer Jenni Konner assigned as an executive producer and will be directed by Jason Benjamin of Orange is the New Black and Girls.
Also making news:
- James Franco made a documentary about Saturday Night Live, and he announced via Instagram you can watch it on Hulu Plus starting this weekend.
- John Malkovich inserted himself into classic photos, and they look like this.
- John Krasinski is attached as producer to two new comedies sold to NBC, both untitled, single-comedies, neither of which he currently has plans in to star.
- As reported in this week’s Hype Cycle column, A Most Violent Year will open the AFI Film Festival and Serena will be released on VOD in February.