When Patrick Swayze (or possibly Patrick Swayze’s stunt double) first jumped over a fence wearing a Ronald Reagan mask in 1991’s Point Break, he had no way of knowing what the simple and effortlessly cool piece of action choreography would inspire. As the third film in Edgar Wright’s ‘Cornetto’ trilogy of comedic genre films hovers on the horizon, fence-jumping is set to return as just one of the films’ running gags and connecting threads.
The World’s End stars Wright’s long-time friends and collaborators Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, along with Martin Freeman, Paddy Considine and Eddie Marsan, as a group of five pals who reunite – with varying levels of enthusiasm – twenty years after a failed pub crawl to return to their home town and finish what they started.
Things don’t quite go according to plan, however, as the men discover their once-peaceful town has been invaded by robots with glowing blue eyes and ink for blood, and that their intention to end the night at a pub called The World’s End might be dangerously appropriate.
Ahead of The World’s End‘s release this summer, IGN has unveiled a featurette explaining how it fits in with the two previous films – Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz – and how three random ideas for movie scripts came together to form a surprisingly cohesive trilogy of films. Featuring a few new clips from The World’s End and some old favorites from the two previous films, as well as interviews with the producers, director and cast, the video is perfectly pitched to recapture the widespread love for the Cornetto films, and to get fans of Wright’s work hyped for the final chapter.
Wright explains that he originally came up with the concept of the ‘Three Flavors Cornetto Trilogy’ as a joke in an interview after he had already finished making Hot Fuzz. The name is a reference to Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Three Colors films, an arthouse trilogy about life in French society that had different stories and characters in each film but thematic threads connecting them. Though Wright was only half-serious at the time, the films he had already made were tied together in multiple ways, and so when it came to writing The World’s End he decided to make the film the concluding entry in a trilogy.
Whilst The World’s End is a comedy about a robot apocalypse, it is not intended as a parody. Pegg emphasizes the fact that the Cornetto trilogy is not a series of parodic films, but rather that each installment is simply an abstraction of a genre into the framework of British comedy – love letters to the kind of films that Wright & Co. love the most. Just as Shaun of the Dead was intended as a genuine zombie movie with humor (a “rom-zom-com”) and Hot Fuzz was an action movie set in an ostensibly quiet English countryside town, The World’s End is “a quest movie with an extremely irresponsible King Arthur at the helm of it.”
The featurette does not show exactly how the Cornetto will come into play in The World’s End, though Simon Pegg mentions that it’s only a “throwaway” reference, but if any of Wright’s films requires the cold snack, it’s this one. After all, the morning after a pub crawl is when a man needs a Cornetto the most.
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The World’s End will be here on August 23, 2013.
