At the end of the underappreciated cinematic masterpiece Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey, we learn that in the future, Bill S. Preston, Esq. and Ted “Theodore” Logan have married the medieval princesses they rescued in the first film, and each have a child. But now that we ourselves are in the future, we have learned that Bill and Ted have daughters, and they named them after each other.
And now they’ve each been cast for Bill & Ted Face the Music.
Bill’s daughter is named Thea Preston (!!!) and she’ll be played by Samara Weaving (late of The Babysitter and Picnic at Hanging Rock), while Atypical‘s Brigette Lundy-Paine will play Billie Logan.
Because of course B&T named their kids after each other.
It gets better from there, since apparently Thea and Billie are joining their dads on yet another adventure to save the universe. This might seem obvious, but it’s so exciting to a certain cohort of ’80s film fans (of which I am one) that their daughters going to go on an adventure! And I really really hope that the film allows them to be just as fun and goofy as their excellent fathers, since girls are long past due for an absurdist duo to call their own. Especially given how much incredible metal there is in the world now—how much fun would it be to watch Thea and Billie blast Amon Amarth at their Maiden-loving dads?
I’m also (and granted, this might just be me) interested in seeing how Bill and Ted, after all of their adventures through time and the afterlife, have dealt with middle age. We know that Alex Winter dealt with it by getting freaking jacked, and that Keanu Reeves has dealt with it by being a living, ageless saint. But the characters of Bill and Ted were defined by their fusion of California grunge/surf wear and classic metal riffs. How do those guys deal with our post-social media world? How have they raised their children? Are their marriages to the princesses still thriving?
And in the realm of worldbuilding, how did the apparent sentience of the Formerly Evil Us-es affect the development of AI? Has Station stayed on Earth? Has Death been reaping people between shows this whole time? And how has definitive knowledge of a personification of Death, and an afterlife, affected daily life, religious practice, public morality, etc. etc?
I am quite sure we won’t get all the answers, but I can’t wait to meet Bille and Thea. Bill & Ted Face the Music is based on a script by the franchise’s creators, Chris Matheson and Ed Solomon, and it’s being directed by Dean Parisot, who directed Galaxy Quest, which is one of the funniest things ever put on screen. Let’s hope they went into the future and left us a bodacious movie to find behind a bush on August 21, 2020.
