10 Movie Sequels Way Better Than They Had Any Right To Be
7. Bill & Ted Face The Music
Post-2015, movies were well and truly in the requel era. Egged on by the huge success of Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens, legacy sequels and soft reboots became a dime a dozen. Some of these turned out to be brilliant (including another entry on this list that I'll get to later), while others stumbled on the basis they had nothing to offer but nostalgia and callbacks.
One of the more unlikely success stories of this nostalgia boom was Bill & Ted Face the Music, a sequel that released almost 30 years after Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey (aka, the best one), and brought back Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter's Theodore Logan and Bill S. Preston for a time-hopping journey of failed dreams and midlife crises.
As a moment in time, Bill & Ted are inseparable from the crop-top sporting, guitar-shredding years of the late eighties and early nineties. Bogus Journey gave them a pretty definitive ending too, and while cult success perhaps made a follow-up inevitable, with almost three decades of distance in between entries, it would've been easy to look at Face the Music as an inessential post-script riding the waves of Reeves' resurgent, John Wick-fuelled popularity.
But, in actuality, the third Bill & Ted film is a resoundingly affecting success. This shouldn't have been a major surprise, given original writers Ed Solomon and Chris Matheson returned to handle the script, but the end results are still unexpectedly magical, with Reeves and Winter effortlessly sliding back into their iconic roles, and being joined this time by their two children, played by Samara Weaving and Brigette Lundy-Paine respectively. It's a more than worthy third chapter for the series, and one that isn't talked about as much as it should be, which we can chalk up to it being released in the summer of 2020 when theatres were still reeling from the COVID-19 pandemic.
Whatever the case, spiriting, hilarious and totally and utterly affectionate in a way only Bill & Ted could be, Face the Music is a film I'm truly grateful for existing.