Ridley Scott addressed long run times for movies in an interview with the BBC recently, and specifically noted that he kept his new historical epic Napoleon under three hours to reduce the audience's “bum ache factor.”

That's quite interesting terminology used by Scott since “bum ache factor” sounds like a phrase that could have been uttered by Bill S. Preston, Esquire, or Ted “Theodore” Logan, from a far superior on-screen version of the notorious French conquerer.

I'm talking of course about the 1989 comedy/sci-fi classic Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, in which a couple San Dimas High School bros use a time machine to bring famous historical figures to their present day to help them with their history project, and one of those famous dudes just happens to be Napoleon.

Seeing Joaquin Phoenix don the infamous Napoleon hat in a dramatic work of cinema and trying to take him seriously just isn't achievable for viewers of a certain age — namely, millenials — since our association with the character is irrevocably tied to the Ziggie Piggy ice cream sundae bogart-ting, water park line cutting, poor-sport bowler version of Napoleon lovingly portrayed by Terry Cammileri.

Social media feels the same, as a recent viral post makes clear. The post, heavily shared across platforms in recent days, includes a memorable image of Napoleon from Bill & Ted's along with the caption, “Ridley Scott's NAPOLEON is three hours of bulls–t. Not ONCE did they show him bowling, eating ice cream or going down a water slide.”

The tongue-in-cheek rant continues, “The Conquest of San Dimas was one of the most important eras of Napoleon's reign. Sorry, I'm siding with the historians here.”

The new Ridley Scott film did manage to eke out a top spot at the box office internationally this weekend, but domestically it finished second to The Hunger Games prequel The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes.

Even though Scott claims to have taken the “bum ache factor” of an excessively long run time out of the equation, he neglected to consider the fact that a treasured characterization of the French emperor already exists in the American cinematic universe.

The world (and this country) currently has its fill of power-hungry aspiring dictators with Napoleonic complexes, so the next time a film auteur has aims to make a biopic out of one, they should heed the timeless words of Bill and Ted and “be excellent to each other” — namely, by avoiding any future biopics of Billy the Kid, Sigmund Freud (pronounced “Frood” of course), the salad dressing dude (Julius Caesar) and/or Noah's wife (Joan of Arc).