The news last week that production for Bill & Ted 3 will most definitely begin soon came as welcomed news to the Internet. In 1989, when Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure was released, there was no Internet, and George Herbert Walker Bush was President. That’s a long time ago, dudes.
Since then, both Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves have had illustrious careers. Reeves, of course, starred in the super trippy Matrix Trilogy – a science-fiction film just like Bill & Ted’s. In the original film, both Bill and Ted have dreams of becoming rock stars like Iron Maiden. For Reeves, in real life, he ultimately achieved this goal, sort of, in his band Dogstar.
Winter has enjoyed a different career trajectory. Most recently, he produced Deep Web The Movie. That film looks inside the dark web and the Silk Road, in particularly the arrest of Ross Ulbricht, who was convicted of being ‘Dread Pirate Roberts’. As the About section on the documentary’s page details:
The film explores how the brightest minds and thought leaders behind the Deep Web are now caught in the crosshairs of the battle for control of a future inextricably linked to technology, with our digital rights hanging in the balance.
Bill and Ted’s has always incorporated technology into its theme, even if it was a bit science-fiction laden. For instance, the film centers on time travel. The first Bill & Ted’s film, Excellent Adventure, features Bill and Ted traveling through time for their final history presentation. They learn that, far in the future, Bill and Ted’s band “Wyld Stallyns” inspired a utopian society. It enjoyed commercial success and ultimately achieved cult status.
Considering Winters’ interest in deep web technology, one must wonder, considering the films science fiction bent, whether or not some of the recent technological innovations since the first Bill and Ted’s film, such as encryption and bitcoin, will play a role.
“Silk Road combined bitcoin and Tor in a way that was so powerful that it created a movement and the mechanics for a new marketplace – a new way of using bitcoin. It popularised bitcoin in such a way that there’s really no going back,” Winters told CoinDesk . “I think bitcoin is very threatening to various established systems because of the community component.” Winters revealed that the Dark Web’s narrator, Reeves, also is a big fan of Bitcoin.
“Keanu has been watching my cuts since the early days of this project, he’s very very interested in this story, so that’s why he got involved. He’s also into bitcoin,” Winter revealed.
Dean Parisot has been tied to the film, and Reeves has described it as “edgy”, which the dark net and bitcoin certainly are.
Reeves revealed in 2010 that Matheson and Solomon were working on a script for a third film. According to Reeves and Winter, the script was completed by spring 2011. The script has been revised numerous times. But, Alex Winter has stated they could start filming in 2016 or 2017.
Images from Wikipedia and YouTube.