Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter Are Ready to Do ‘Bill & Ted 4’
Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter can’t stop dreaming of a utopian Bill and Ted future.
The two actors recently starred in a Broadway revival of Waiting for Godot, giving reviewers a chance to unleash all the Bill & Ted puns. “Cue the air guitar,” joked the New York Times. “Bogus? Not a jot,” wrote the Observer. “Godot is hardly an excellent adventure,” according to a New York Post pan.
But now that Reeves and Winter are established members of the legitimate theater, would they really continue their partnership and go back in time for Bill & Ted 4? “Yes and yes,” Keanu enthused this week at Variety's Business of Broadway Breakfast.
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Winter credited the actors’ Bill and Ted rapport for the success of the slacker-style Samuel Beckett revival. The play’s director, Jamie Lloyd, “remarked that our friendship, our history together, really suits the play because of the friendship and connection that two characters have,” Winter explained.
But we might have to wait a while for Bill & Ted 4. The third installment in the series, Bill & Ted Face the Music, was released in 2020, despite a script that was completed in 2010. Coming out at the height of COVID-19 made for lousy box office, resulting in a domestic gross of just $3.4 million, which isn’t going to have studios lining up to make another one.
That won’t stop Winter and Reeves from trying, though. A script “will get written,” Winter promised last year, according to IGN. A “really great” idea has already been hatched by Chris Matheson and Ed Solomon, the team behind the first two movies in the series, Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure and Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey.
“We’re tinkering with a fourth movie idea that all of us like, and the guys are going to write, so we’ll see,” Winter said on the Sarah O’Connell Show. “It takes us time to get these things going, and we never want to do them unless they’re great.”
Why keep going back to Bill and Ted movies? “Because they’re oddball, and they’re not typical mainstream films,” Winter said. “They’ve never been cash-grab movies; nobody has gotten rich off the Bill and Ted movies, so we really do make them sincerely from a place of love and interest. … It will get written, and we’ll see when we can actually get it made. It may be a little while.”
But how long? Reeves and Winter were in their early 20s when they starred as high schoolers in Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure; Reeves is now 61, and Winter is 60. If Bill & Ted 4 takes as long from script to screen as Bill & Ted Face the Music, the guys will be pushing 70, or about 20 years older than George Carlin in the original.
Bill & Ted Face the Music introduced the duo’s teenage daughters. Here’s hoping a Bill & Ted 4 could feature the guys handing off their time machine once and for all to a new generation.
