Whoa.
With 'Bill & Ted Face The Music' arriving in cinemas this week, the totally bodacious sequel to the '90s high-concept comedy has been getting rave reviews, not to mention our own four-star review.
Yet, for all of this, the road for 'Bill & Ted Face The Music' was a long one and involved multiple re-writes, not to mention financiers and production deals falling through time and time again.
In a lengthy interview with Collider, writers Ed Solomon and Chris Matheson detailed how long it took for the movie to happen, and how many rewrites it went through before it landed on what's now playing in cinemas.
"The script transitioned quite a few times over the years, especially the end. The irony of it all was figuring out what the song was came down to the final minute as well... We always knew that writing a song and making the song ‘so good that it will unite the world’ was an impossible task and we’re setting ourselves up for failure. So we gradually started to realize, when we were trying to figure out how do we get out of that idea gracefully, that okay it’s not gonna be about the quality of the song per se, it’s gonna be about the fact that everyone plays it together," they said.
More pointedly, however, was how they were going to get all those instruments into everyone's hands. Even using the time-machine phonebox wouldn't help, so who else knows how to be in several places at once?
Why, Santa Claus of course.
"We had a version that I really loved that did not last very long, it lasted for one draft. Bill and Ted had to get instruments to everyone in the world throughout all space and time in one evening, and they were like, ‘How are we gonna possibly do that? We have no way to do that!’ and they say, ‘Well we can’t, but there’s one man who can,’ and then we cut to, ‘Ho ho ho!’ and a sleigh, and it was Bill and Ted and the Princesses on Santa’s sleigh using Santa magic because Santa can go around the world in one night."
That ending could have been brilliant, to be honest. After all, this is a movie where the personification of Death is a main character and is an overzealous bass player. Kid Cudi is a time-travel expert.
Throwing Santa into the mix could have easily worked.