#Why Bill and Ted Face the Music Traded Sons for Daughters

Thirty years ago, Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey seemingly closed the final chapter on the lead duo’s time-traveling shenanigans, ending with Bill and Ted getting married and raising their children, one each. Fans assumed the babies shown at the end of the movie were boys, but the truth is even the writers were not sure. Ed Solomon and Chris Matheson, who have written every Bill and Ted film including the upcoming Bill & Ted Face the Music, revealed that the gender of the children was always up for debate. As Solomon explained.

“I’d like to pretend they were always girls. They weren’t always girls. We assumed, because we were adolescent boys when we wrote Excellent Adventure, and we were barely post-adolescent boys when we wrote Bogus Journey, of course we assumed they were going to be boys. They happened to be played by girls, interestingly. Candace and Lauren Mead played those characters. But regardless, look, we were immature adolescent males. And so we wrote an immature adolescent male fantasy. 30 years pass. Life changes. The world changes. We change, we grow up, we get married, we have children, we have sons, we have daughters. And of course our culture evolves, as it should.”

For a section of the fandom, changing the gender of the children is viewed as an attempt by the writers to appeal to the ‘woke’ crowd at the expense of disrupting the franchise’s canon. For Solomon, turning Bill and Ted’s children into girls provided a way to reinvent the whole dynamic of the franchise and make it more inclusive.

“We still, in 2009 and 2010, we thought, ‘Let’s write them as boys.’ Because that’s what we figured! Young Will and Theo. And I cannot tell you how boring they work. Oh God derivative. Stale. We tried to give them like Bill and Ted type voices. Just unbelievably like rehashed crap. We hated it. We tried to make them into cool guys. That was stupid. And then when we finally had the idea a few years later, ‘Wait, why are we beating our heads against the wall with this? What if they had daughters? What if it’s Billie and Thea?’ It just opened it up completely. So that’s much better idea. And it helped us with something we were trying and to do anyway with the movie, which is — the first two movies, they are male centric. They were written by boys who knew no better. And so this also gave us a chance to go, ‘Let’s just widen it, man. Let’s like, let there be more of a female presence and just make it more inclusive.”

Directed by Dean Parisot and written by Chris Matheson and Ed Solomon, Bill & Ted Face the Music features Keanu Reeves, Alex Winter reprising their lead roles from the original films, along with newcomers Anthony Carrigan, Kid Cudi, Brigette Lundy-Paine and Samara Weaving. The film is slated to arrive in theaters and on premium video on demand Aug. 28. This news comes from Cinemablend.

Topics: Bill and Ted 3, Bill and Ted, Streaming