The World's End is a 2013 science fiction comedy film directed by Edgar Wright and written by Wright and Simon Pegg. It is the third and final film in the Three Flavours Cornetto trilogy, after Shaun of the Dead (2004) and Hot Fuzz (2007). Starring Pegg, Nick Frost, Paddy Considine, Martin Freeman, Eddie Marsan, Rosamund Pike and Pierce Brosnan, the film focuses on five friends who return to their hometown for a pub crawl and uncover an alien invasion.
In 1995, Wright wrote a screenplay titled Crawl about teenagers on a pub crawl. Deciding it was better suited as a comedic exploration of young adulthood and aging, he reworked the screenplay with Pegg in the early 2010s. The film was produced by Relativity Media, Big Talk Productions and Working Title Films. Principal photography began on 28 September 2012 and lasted until that December, with filming locations including Elstree Studios, Letchworth Garden City, and Welwyn Garden City. The stunts were coordinated by members of Jackie Chan Stunt Team, and The World's End is considered a social science fiction film.
The World's End premiered at Leicester Square in London on 10 July 2013, and was theatrically released in the United Kingdom by Universal Pictures on 19 July. Its release in the United States by Focus Features followed on 23 August. The film received positive reviews, with praise for the screenplay, performances of the cast, humour and direction. It won Best British Film at the 19th Empire Awards, and was nominated for Best Comedy at the 19th Critics' Choice Awards. The World's End grossed $46.1 million worldwide on a budget of $20 million.
Plot Gary King, an immature 40-year-old alcoholic, decides to recapture his youth by inviting boyhood friends Oliver Chamberlain, Peter Page, Steven Prince, and Andrew Knightley to complete the "Golden Mile", a pub crawl encompassing 12 pubs in their hometown of Newton Haven. The group attempted the crawl as teens in 1990, but did not reach the final pub, The World's End. Andy is now a teetotaller due to a 1997 drunk driving accident while taking Gary to the hospital after the latter suffered a drug overdose. He reluctantly agrees to join after Gary lies about his mother dying.
The group encounters Oliver's sister, Sam, who Gary and Steven fought over in school. In the fourth pub, after getting told by the others that he needs to 'grow up', an angry Gary goes to the toilet and gets into a fight with a teenager. He knocks his head off, exposing him as an android. Gary's friends encounter several other androids and fight them off. They realize androids, which they dub "Blanks", have taken over the town.
Gary urges continuing the pub crawl to avoid suspicion. They bump into Sam once more, and she, Gary, and Steven fight Blank versions of Sam's childhood friends, known as the "twins". Sam tags along, and Steven is told by Basil, a local conspiracy theorist who has not yet been replaced by a Blank, that the Blanks are trying to build a galactic conglomerate, and that any humans refusing will be replaced with identical Blanks. The Blanks attempt to convince the humans to surrender. Unwilling to lose their humanity and, finding out that both Oliver and their old school teacher, Mr. Shepherd, have been replaced, the group fights a bar full of Blanks.
Gary lets Sam escape Newton Haven; Pete is captured after attacking the Blank that has replaced his childhood bully; and, when Andy and Steven try to escape, Gary ditches them to finish the Golden Mile alone. Andy and Steven pursue Gary, as does the rest of Newton Haven, as Steven is captured.
In The World's End, Andy confronts Gary and reveals that his wife has recently left him and taken their children; it also comes out that Gary was committed to a psychiatric hospital following a recent suicide attempt. Andy tries to stop Gary from drawing his final pint, but Gary clings to completing the Mile, because he has nothing else to live for. When Gary pulls the lever to pour a pint, the floor lowers into a hidden chamber.
The Network, a disembodied alien entity, tells Gary and Andy that Newton Haven is one of dozens of communities infiltrated by Blanks around the world and claims responsibility for leaps in human technology in the past twenty years, all this with the end goal of assimilating humanity into the galactic community. The Network offers Gary eternal youth if he becomes a Blank, but he refuses. The Network admits that the vast majority of humans it has encountered have shown resistance, necessitating the creation of an unprecedented proportion of Blank replacements while the originals are killed and recycled as compost. Along with Andy and Steven, who has escaped, Gary calls out the tyranny in the Network's plan and demands that humanity be left to its own devices. The Network, exasperated, agrees to abandon the invasion. Sam rescues Gary, Andy, and Steven as the town is destroyed, but they are unable to outrun the pulse triggered by the departure of the Network, which deactivates Sam's car.
The pulse triggers a worldwide blackout that destroys all electrical power on Earth, sending humanity back to the Dark Ages. The remaining Blanks reactivate a few weeks later and, although they are now independent from the Network, they are mistrusted and shunned by most of the surviving humans. Andy's marriage recovers, Steven begins a relationship with Sam, and the Blank versions of Peter and Oliver pick up where their human versions left off. In the ruins of Newton Haven, the now-sober Gary enters a pub with the Blank versions of his younger friends and orders water. When the bartender refuses to serve Blanks, Gary leads his friends into a brawl with Gary declaring himself the king.
Cast
Production
Development The World's End originated as a screenplay by writer-director Edgar Wright in 1995 at the age of 21 titled Crawl, about a group of teenagers on a pub crawl. He later realised the idea could work with adult characters to capture "the bittersweet feeling of returning to your home town and feeling like a stranger". Wright also said he wanted to satirise the "strange homogeneous branding that becomes like a virus", explaining: "This doesn't just extend to pubs, it's the same with cafés and restaurants. If you live in a small town and you move to London, which I did when I was 20, then when you go back out into the other small towns in England you go 'oh my god, it's all the same!' It's like Bodysnatchers: literally our towns are being changed to death."
In an interview for Entertainment Weekly, Pegg told Clark Collis, "People think we choose the genre first every time, and it's not true. We find the stories first. The notion of alienation from your hometown taken to its literal conclusion was how we got to science fiction."
After the story was complete, Wright and Pegg examined a list of real pub names and "tried to make them like tarot cards" to foreshadow the events of the story. Wright explained: "So we said, 'OK this one's the Famous Cock, because this is where Gary is trying to puff up his own importance.' ... We did go through and work out in each one how the pub sign was going to relate."
Wright and Pegg began working intensively on the screenplay in mid-2011 at Working Title Films' offices in the United States. Producer Nira Park arranged a period in which the pair could work together in the same room, where they plotted the film scene-by-scene using flip charts. Pegg described the writing process as relatively swift, attributing this to the working rhythm he and Wright had developed through their previous collaborations.
Filming
Principal photography for The World's End began on 28 September 2012. Filming took place in Hertfordshire, at Elstree Studios and on location in Letchworth Garden City and Welwyn Garden City. Part of the film was also shot at High Wycombe railway station, Buckinghamshire.
All twelve pubs in the film use identical signage on menus and walls, reflecting what Wright called "that fake hand-written chalk" common to modern British pubs. The exteriors of the real pubs were shot at locations in Welwyn Garden City and Letchworth Garden City, with altered signage. Letchworth Garden City railway station received a makeover to become the "Hole in the Wall". Wright chose Letchworth Garden City and Welwyn Garden City partly because their early twentieth-century architecture evoked the atmosphere of British science fiction, particularly the work of John Wyndham. He noted that both settlements had Quaker origins and had historically been designed with relatively few drinking establishments, requiring the production to fabricate some of the pubs seen in the film. Stunts were coordinated by Brad Allan, of martial arts film director Jackie Chan's stunt team. Wright said: "In Drunken Master, Jackie Chan has to get drunk to fight, but this is more the idea of Dutch courage. You know, when you're kind of drunk and you think 'ah, I can climb up that scaffolding!' Or just that you're impervious to pain. One of the things we talked about is this idea that [the characters] become better fighters the more oiled they get."
The Broadway Cinema, Letchworth, a renovated independent cinema built in the 1930s in the Art Deco style, was used to portray the Mermaid pub. This cinema was also the first outside London to play the film, with a special introduction by Pegg thanking the residents of Letchworth for their help during its making; over 800 viewers watched the film at the cinema on its opening night.
Wright chose to shoot the film on photographic film rather than digitally, in keeping with Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. The main portion of the film was photographed on 35 mm film, while the 1990 prologue was shot on 16 mm film.
Wright rehearsed the film in a manner he compared to a stage play and generally avoided improvisation during filming. Movement coach Cal McCrystal worked with the principal actors and the performers playing their younger counterparts, using mirroring exercises to establish shared physical characteristics between the two versions of each character.
Soundtrack
The film uses alternative rock and pop music from the time of the characters' adolescence. Wright explained: "A lot of those songs are ones that really hit me and Simon hard when we were that age... [Gary] is still living by those rules. It's like he decided to take 'Loaded' and 'I'm Free' to heart and thinks the party's never going to end."
The soundtrack for the film was released on 5 August 2013 in the UK and 20 August 2013 in the United States, with the film's score, composed by Steven Price, released on the same day. In addition to songs featured in the film, the album also features dialogue snippets.
The only songs featured in the film that did not make it onto the soundtrack are "The Only One I Know", "Summer's Magic", and "The Only Rhyme That Bites" by the Charlatans, MC Tunes and 808 State respectively. The version of "20 Seconds to Comply" which features in the film is the mix from Silver Bullet's album Bring Down the Walls No Limit Squad Returns, albeit edited to remove dialogue samples from RoboCop. On the soundtrack album, it is replaced by the Bomb Squad mix (again re-edited to remove the samples). The original soundtrack tributes the song "No Opportunity Necessary, No Experience Needed" by Yes when the young characters reach the hills.
Release
The World's End premiered on 10 July 2013 at Leicester Square in London and was released on 19 July 2013 in the United Kingdom. It was released in the United States on 23 August 2013.
Reception
Box office The World's End earned £2,122,288 during its UK opening weekend, losing the top spot to Monsters University. Its weekend grosses were higher than Shaun of the Deads £1.6 million but lower than Hot Fuzzs £5.4 million..