With talks of a third ‘Bill & Ted’ movie on the rise, we’ve recently learned that an alternate ending for ‘Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure’ had the duo responsible for the start of the Civil War. With the time-traveling adventures that Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter went through as their characters this wouldn’t be too surprising. While pushing for everyone to “party on” likely wasn’t the cause of the war, maybe their mantra of “be excellent to each other” could have been the cause.
When the two actors recently got back together with writers Chris Matheson and Ed Solomon for Entertainment Weekly, all kinds of fun facts about where they want the new film to go and, in this case, what could have been different in the original film have emerged.
According to Matheson:
“The original impulse. Was that they were going to be responsible for everything bad that ever happened in human history. Like, they caused the Civil War. They caused World War I. They caused the Titanic to sink.”
Yikes! Maybe, that isn’t being excellent at all. But how could this all have happened? At one point the list of possible locations and names for the first film included things like “Revolutionary France, Egypt, Medieval England, Pirates, Magna Carta, Arthurian Legend, Charlemagne, Columbus, Hitler, Russian Revolution, Richard Nixon” and more. In fact, Solomon adds that “One of the popular kids in the school ended up friends with Hitler for some reason.” Matheson added, “This tells you how ostracized we felt by the popular kids.”
In today’s culture that joke might have missed the mark with audiences, and thankfully through an extensive series of rewrites, those didn’t happen.
Winter told us that the original ending of the film was also drastically different:
“We just bring the historical figures back to our classroom. And Keanu just sat on the desk and watched them kind of talk about who they were. Then we’d go to the prom, and that’s the end. Even while we were shooting it, we were kind of depressed.”
Thankfully, they reshot the ending which ended up happening for both of the movies.
Are you curious as to seeing how Bill & Ted could have been responsible for every major disaster and war in history or are you glad things played out the way they did? Share your thoughts below!
