Bill & Ted Face the Music gets a new trailer, poster and release date

A brand new trailer and poster dropped for Bill and Ted Face the Music on Thursday.

The long awaited sci-fi comedy sequel is also getting a new distribution strategy, according to Orion Pictures.

After originally being set of an August release, the film will now be ‘available On Demand and in theaters September 1,’ said the distributor. 

The latest full length trailers shows Ted Logan (Keanu Reeves) and Bill S. Preston (Alex Winter) attending couple’s therapy – together.

Joined by their respective wives, Bill defends the inseparable pair’s decision to combine their appointments.

‘I mean, we’re a couple of couples, right?’ asks the now middle-aged slacker. 

In one scene, Ted’s dad Captain Logan admonishes his son and son’s friend, telling them to ‘get real jobs’ and to ‘be role models for your daughters’ (Thea and Billie, played by Samara Weaving and Brigette Lundy-Paine respectively).

Even Ted complains, ‘we’ve spent our whole lives trying to unite the world, and I’m tired dude’.

The plot involves the duo trying to come up with a song that will ‘save reality as we know it.’ 

However not knowing exactly how to do that, the pair decide upon a shortcut: to steal the song from their future selves.

As Bill and Ted travel forward in time and encounter their jacked-up future incarnations in a prison yard, we see their daughters also getting involved in the adventure.

‘Dude, our dads are totally in trouble,’ worries Billie. 

‘We should help them out,’ suggests Thea, with the duo then seen engaging in their own time travel exploits as they try to recruit famous musicians of the past to help their dads with their song.

Just over 30 years after their first ‘excellent adventure, Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter return as the title characters in Bill & Ted Face the Music, which Reeves recently called a ‘scrappy independent movie.’

Fans have been clamoring for this sequel for nearly three decades, following 1989’s Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure and the 1991 follow-up Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey.

After years upon years of delays and false starts, the movie will finally arrive later this year, with both Reeves and Winter, both 55, speaking about the sequel with Total Film and shedding some new light on the project. 

The sequel picks up in present day, with Bill S. Preston Esquire (Winter) and Ted Theodore Logan (Reeves) now middle-aged dads.

The hard-rocking duo were told in the first two movies, upon visiting the future, that they would write the song that would save the world.

Years later, they still haven’t done so, when they are warned by a visitor from the future that they must fulfill their destiny.

Reeves said that the ‘scrappy’ nature of the film is, part of the charm,’ adding, ‘this movie is very much in the spirit of the other two films across the board.’

He added fans will get, ‘Easter egg cameos, and there are other important musical figures that are prominent.’

‘I don’t want to give too much of it away but the spirit of it, all the way down to the soundtrack… it’s a Bill & Ted movie, straight up,’ Reeves said.

William Sadler returns as Death for the sequel, though while Reeves wouldn’t reveal any of the cameos, his co-star Winter added, ‘People will recognize them as who they are from the get-go.’

‘They haven’t turned into different people. But a lot of the comic conceit comes from that idea. If you’ve got two normally unstoppable, persevering characters like this who are faced with a pretty great challenge, and they’re older, and they’re dealing with the realities of life on top of the challenges they’re facing, then what does that do?’ he added.

Dean Parisot (Galaxy Quest) directs from a script by original Bill & Ted writers Ed Solomon and Chris Matheson, with Parisot admitting they didn’t have a big budget to work with. 

‘I would say, for production, we probably had the amount of money we’d get to make a television pilot,’ Parisot joked. ‘And we had to make a movie that takes place in Hell, and has the destruction of space and time, and the future prosthetics.’

The director added that a number of ‘well-known artists’ who have won awards for their work ‘took incredible pay cuts and did anything to accomplish this project.’

‘I think it’s because there’s such a love for these characters and what they represent. We have struggled the entire time to eke out something that we loved. But it’s a testament to everyone’s commitment, because both Keanu and Alex, and Chris and Ed, never gave up. But that sort of made it all great fun,’ Parisot said.

Bill & Ted Face the Music, which also stars Samara Weaving and Bridget Lundy-Paine as Bill and Ted’s daughters, Jayma Mays as Princess Joanna, Erinn Hayes as Princess Elizabeth and Holland Taylor as The Great Leader, will be released on August 28.