Making The World's End A Sci-Fi Film Wasn't Always Edgar Wright's Plan
There are few people working in movies who are as adept at both satirizing and paying loving tribute to various genres of cinema as Edgar Wright. Going back to his time working on the BBC series "Spaced" alongside his longtime collaborator Simon Pegg, it's obvious that Wright has a deep affection for the movies and genres at which he's poking a bit of fun. From zombies in "Shaun of the Dead" (a clear homage to the films of George Romero), to "Hot Fuzz" (buddy cop and action films like the "Bad Boys" franchise), to the final movie in his Cornetto Trilogy, "The World's End" (science fiction classics like "Invasion of the Body Snatchers"), it's fully apparent that Wright understands both what makes those types of movies great, but also what makes them a bit ridiculous, when you step back and really analyze them.
"The World's End" is such a masterful homage to the genre that it's hard to believe it wasn't necessarily going to be a science fiction film to begin with. In fact, its origins come from a much, much different type of movie: the classic coming-of-age tale. Specifically, Wright has noted that his original idea, which came about in the form of a script called "Crawl," was influenced more by movies like "Dazed and Confused" than "The Stepford Wives."
The personal stories at the heart of a sci-fi comedy
For those who haven't seen it, "The World's End" is about a group of childhood friends who reunite (at the urging of the central character, Gary King, played by Simon Pegg) to complete a pub crawl in their home town after failing as teenagers. The movie is extremely personal for both Pegg and Edgar Wright, but for different reasons. For Pegg, who plays Gary as an emotionally-stunted alcoholic desperately clinging to his youth, it was a way to deal with his own alcohol abuse. In the film, Gary is dead set on finishing the pub crawl, no matter the cost or the danger involved. As Pegg told The Guardian in 2018:
"That's what addiction is like. It's like you have grown a second head and all it wants to do is destroy itself, and it puts that ahead of everything else –- your marriage, children, your job."
For Wright, it was equally personal, but only in terms of the plot (minus the aliens) stemming from a real-life instance. As he relayed to TimeOut in 2016:
"Some friends of mine and I did something very similar when we were 18. Our adventure ended just as badly as the one does in the film ... Then, when we were promoting 'Hot Fuzz,' I thought, What would happen if those kids had grown up and then tried to re-create that situation as responsible adults, as a way of chasing their former glories?"
The idea to add in the sci-fi elements came later, when thinking about how alienated you can begin to feel after returning to your hometown following some time away. Things change, and soon enough, become hard to recognize.
Going from feeling alienated to actual aliens
For Edgar Wright, the idea of introducing aliens into the plot of "The World's End" came from feeling like a bit of an alien in the place where he grew up. Another of the film's stars, Nick Frost, also commented to TimeOut on how foreign such a familiar place can feel after a long time away:
"It's happened to all of us ... The more you go back, the more things that you remember just disappear. It's like watching that time-lapse photography of a bowl of fruit rotting away. There, and then phfft! Gone."
So the idea of turning the idea of feeling alienated on its head, and creating a scenario in which the reason you feel so out of place in a place you used to know so well is because everyone else has changed, not you, came pretty naturally. As Wright continued in his interview with TimeOut:
"But that whole strain of smart sci-fi movies — what I like to call the 'quiet invasion' genre — seemed like the perfect way of looking at that bittersweet feeling that I described originally: You feel alienated from the place you came from. You don't recognize the place you grew up anymore."
It's a feeling anyone who has returned to their hometown after years away, maybe to see old friends or for a class reunion, can relate to. Maybe without the apocalyptic stakes that come about by the end of the film, of course. But come on — you can't tell us there wasn't at least one person from back home you suspected, and might still suspect, comes from another planet.