Get Ready to Fire Up the Phone Booth, ‘Bill & Ted 3’ Has a Director

By Nathan Adams

The last time we checked in on the progress of Bill & Ted 3, the screen’s Bill S. Preston, Esq., Alex Winter, informed us that both he and the actor who portrayed “Ted” Theodore Logan, Keanu Reeves, were very much on board to make another sequel, a script for the film had been completed, and everybody was very happy with how it read. Unfortunately, the movie still wasn’t officially green lit by anyone, and wasn’t guaranteed to ever actually happen.

Happily, there’s some new movement regarding the project that suggests we may be one step closer to the glorious fantasy of Bill & Ted 3 getting financed becoming a reality. Vulture is reporting that Bill & Ted creators Ed Solomon and Chris Matheson (who wrote this third Bill & Ted movie on spec) have attached director Dean Parisot to their script, joining both principal actors in a tidy little package that’s likely to look fairly attractive to studios. Parisot mostly busies himself with TV work, but he did also direct the well-liked satire Galaxy Quest back in 1999, so he’s no stranger to big screen comedy.

Now the only question left is who’s actually going to step up and finance this thing. MGM still officially owns the rights to the characters, but word is this new project is being shopped around to the other studios in hopes of finding a co-financier. Solomon and Matheson reportedly view their film, which gives us a look at the lives of the grown-up versions of Bill and Ted, as a mid-priced comedy on the level of something like Hot Tub Time Machine, so it’s not like they’re trying to break the bank by attempting to turn the property into an effects-heavy time travel epic or anything.

Given Hollywood’s recent obsession with remaking things from the ’80s, it’s probably only a matter of time before somebody becomes interested in making more Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure. I guess the only question is if any of the decision makers are going to be willing to do a real-life sequel with a couple of old guys, rather than the now standard reboot with young actors. Seeing as Parisot still has to shoot the sequel to RED this upcoming spring, Solomon and Matheson have plenty of time to sell the idea to the bean counters. Here’s to hoping they succeed, because if our only option other than a new crop of remakes is a crop of sequels to old properties with the original creators involved, we’re probably all in agreement that we’d rather take the sequels. Aren’t we?