‘The World’s End’ Aiming To Shoot Next Year
Aside from being an exceptionally fun movie, Greg Mottola‘s “Paul” seems to be a haven for upcoming project news; we’ve got dozens of updates on future movies concerning the extensive talent in that film.
We sat down with Nick Frost and Simon Pegg who were stumping for “Paul” at SXSW, and another one of those possible flicks caught us by surprise — a sequel, or sequels. “As soon as we can we’re writing. We have a bunch of ideas, not least of all for ‘Pauls’ eventually,” Frost said, emphasizing the plural. “If people want it and we can find a good story there and Greg fancies it, then potentially we have something.”
The idea of a sequel is entirely plausible given the nature of the original, which wasn’t held down by narrative and found time to embellish characters and situations in an unforced way. Surely there are more adventures to be had, but ultimately it’ll be up to the picture’s performance this coming weekend (and it’s currently doing great biz in the U.K. hauling in roughly $19 million U.S. to date).
And there’s more where that came from. Frost hints at two more Pegg/Frost collaborations, but wouldn’t say what they were. “We got an another idea, ideas. Simon and I have two more projects in the pipeline at this point. Simon and Edgar are going to try and get together later this year and do the third in the ‘Blood and Ice Cream‘ trilogy which we will hopefully shoot next year.” Will the tentatively-titled “The World’s End” be Wright’s next project? We’ll have to see but with “Star Trek 2” mounting to shoot at the same time as writing on the project was set to finish, that picture might be on hold a bit longer . “[It’s] probably shooting the latter half of this year, but I can’t wait to get back to it,” mentioned Pegg. We enjoyed the original “Star Trek” fine, but the “Blood and Ice Cream” trilogy is something we fancy a bit more, and we’d hate to see the finale shafted and pushed way back for something else.
Another thing we’d like to see from Pegg is his presence in the gestating adaptation of “The Boys” by Adam McKay, playing Wee Hughie which was basically based off of him in the first place. Unfortunately, Simon doesn’t think he’s wee enough. “I don’t know if I’m too old for Wee Hughie, you know, I’m a 41 year old man, Wee Hughie is like a young guy,” to which Nick quickly added “Who else is [McKay] going to go to? You could just play Hughie.” Laughter erupted, but Pegg stuck to his guns. “I think Darick and Garth [Ennis] imagined Wee Hughie as [my character] Tim from ‘Spaced,’ not Simon Pegg, 41 years old. But we’ll see.”
As for whether Frost will be taking it easy after his big alien movie, he only responds with more work. “I’m doing a couple indie films at home in the U.K., writing a graphic novel and writing a film about a wrestler. So I’m keeping busy.” That’s an understatement.
“Paul” opens this Friday everywhere. —reporting by RP