Comic-Con: Edgar Wright Brings About The World's End

Director Edgar Wright and stars Simon Pegg and Nick Frost were at San Diego Comic-Con on Friday to tout their latest genre-bending comedy The World's End, which opens stateside August 23 (it's already out in the UK).

A signature brew of camaraderie, knockabout humor, excessive quaffing, questionable life choices, hand-to-hand combat, and explosive surprises, The World’s End begins on June 22nd, 1990. In their suburban U.K. town of Newton Haven, five boys in the prime of their teenage youth celebrate the end of school by attempting an epic pub crawl together. Despite their enthusiasm and the downing of a slew of pints of beer, they fall short of seeing their quest through, to the last pub on their list, The World’s End.

Twenty-odd years later, “the five musketeers” have each left their hometown and are now husbands, fathers, men with careers – with the flashing-red-light exception of Gary King (Simon Pegg), who is now a 40-year-old man trapped at the cigarette end of his teens. The irrepressible Gary, keenly aware of his estrangement from his onetime closest friend Andy (Nick Frost), becomes hellbent on trying “The Golden Mile” drinking marathon again. He convinces Andy, Steven (Paddy Considine), Oliver (Martin Freeman), and Peter (Eddie Marsan) to stage an encore, and one Friday afternoon they are all reunited. Gary is in his element: the mandate is one night, five guys, twelve pubs – imbibing at least one pint apiece at each establishment.

Arriving in Newton Haven, they re-encounter Oliver’s sister Sam (Rosamund Pike), for whom Gary and Steven each still carry a torch. As the gang attempts along the way to reconcile their past and present, an increasingly insane and dangerous series of encounters with old haunts and acquaintances makes them realize that the real struggle is for the future, not just theirs but humankind’s. Reaching The World’s End is the least of their worries.

Returning to Comic-Con almost a decade after appearing there for Shaun of the Dead, Wright, Pegg and Frost were welcomed in Hall H by huge cheers from the crowd. Wright joked that if you liked Doctor Who but thought it'd be better if he were drunk then this is the movie for you (he even dubbed it "Doctor Hooch").

Pegg enjoyed playing the character of Gary King who he described as dark and nutty and being a dick who never really left living in 1990. Frost liked that he got to play "an angry, buttoned-up hard nut" rather than a stoner.

Wright said that most British movies try to increase their international appeal by casting American stars, but he was happy to make a particularly British film that Americans can enjoy for that very reason and style of humor. Pegg said that while this is the last part of a trilogy (see the video above) it certainly won't be the last time they work together.

This particular trilogy is about extended adolescence and the individual facing off against a massive enemy, and that they are all set in the contemporary U.K. The next film they do together could be set elsewhere or in the past and that they don't need to be tied thematically or otherwise to their past films together.

Source : feeds[dot]ign[dot]com