Today, Focus Features released the domestic trailer for “The World’s End,” the latest film by Edgar Wright, and it’s far more revelatory than the UK version of the trailer. My guess is that in the UK, it’s enough to sell the film on the names of Wright, Simon Pegg, and Nick Frost, but here in the US, the studio feels like they’ve got to sell the concept and give people enough information that they know what they’re getting into before the film opens.
I get that the cast is far better known in the UK. After all, you’ve also got Paddy Considine, Martin Freeman, and Eddie Marsan, and while all of those guys are in plenty of films that play here, including last year’s “The Hobbit,” of course, they are simply better known at home. I may love Shane Meadows movies, but I am able to admit that they haven’t exactly set the box-office ablaze in this country. So you’ve got a cast that is going to be amazing to watch, but that aren’t the names you use to open the film here.
Also, Focus has to be aware of “This Is The End,” another star-driven end-of-the-world comedy that is coming out this summer, and the early trailers for the films certainly make them look like they cover similar ground. I saw “This Is The End” last night (my review will be up a week from Friday), and now that I’ve seen this trailer, I’m confident that the two films couldn’t be more different.
It’s not just because the things in this movie appear to be robots, either. The other film deals with the actual end of civilization on Earth, while this appears to be another Edgar Wright film about small English villages and the secrets they hide. That’s my favorite thing about “Hot Fuzz,” and watching the film a second or third or fourth time, what I like most is looking at the ways he seeds the film with clues that only really become clear with a re-watch.
Simon Pegg’s the lynchpin here, the guy who draws all the others back together for a pub crawl in the village where they grew up. It looks like an act of desperate nostalgia on his part, and it’s the seediest I’ve ever seen Pegg look on film. It’s interesting seeing Nick Frost as the guy who doesn’t drink anymore, and this film also establishes more about Rosamund Pike’s role in the film.
It is the big reveal of the blue-blooded robots that makes this trailer the most spoiler-heavy sneak peek at the film so far, and it certainly looks like a crazy genre mash-up thrill, one that should round out our summer of movies in high style.
“The World’s End” hits the US on August 23, 2013.