In 2013, Edgar Wright completed his “Three Flavors Cornetto Trilogy.” After lampooning zombie movies in Shaun of the Dead and buddy cop actioners in Hot Fuzz, Wright reteamed with Simon Pegg and Nick Frost to parody sci-fi thrillers like Invasion of the Body Snatchers with The World’s End, in which five childhood friends return to their hometown for a pub crawl and find that it’s been taken over by alien robots.
Like Wright’s two previous Cornetto movies, The World’s End carefully foreshadows upcoming plot points. For starters, the name of every pub the guys visit telegraphs what happens there.
The First Post
The meaning behind the name The First Post is pretty simple: it’s the first pub on the crawl. It takes a couple of pubs to ease into the crawl, so not a lot happens at The First Post.
This is partly because it takes a couple of pints to get the night into full swing anyway, but also because Gary’s friends aren’t nearly as thrilled about the crawl as he is.
The Old Familiar
After leaving The First Post, the guys go to The Old Familiar, which looks exactly the same as The First Post. Oliver claims this is a result of “Starbucking,” or chain pubs taking over from free houses.
Oliver’s claim that chain pubs are removing Britain’s pubs of all individuality foreshadows the revelation that “The Network” is doing the same thing to the population of Newton Haven.
The Famous Cock
The Famous Cock is the first pub on the crawl in which somebody recognizes Gary. After Gary spent the first act claiming to be a local legend in Newton Haven, it quickly becomes apparent that nobody in town remembers who he is.
However, the pub landlord only recognizes Gary because his reckless behavior got him banned during the first crawl. In order to keep the crawl going, Gary finishes a few discarded pints from a table in the beer garden.
The Cross Hands
The movie’s first fight scene takes place in the men’s bathroom in The Cross Hands. Gary encounters a teenage “blank” and ends up decapitating him against a urinal.
When Gary’s friends and the blank’s friends all come into the bathroom, an intense brawl ensues. This marks the first time that all five guys work together since reuniting.
The Good Companions
After uncovering the alien conspiracy that’s taken over the town, the guys decide that their best course of action would be to continue the pub crawl and pretend everything’s normal so they don’t arouse suspicion from the killer robots that surround them.
So, they pretend to be enjoying a pleasant, ordinary night out and move on to a pub that’s appropriately called The Good Companions.
The Trusty Servant
In The Trusty Servant, the guys bump into their own “trusty servant,” the dealer who sold them pot in high school. His nickname is “Reverend Green,” named after the Cluedo character known as “Mr. Green” in North America.
Gary joins Reverend Green at the bar and tries to figure out if his body has been snatched by the “blanks.” As it turns out, he’s one of the few safe ones.
The Two-Headed Dog
Twins are a recurring motif in the Three Flavors Cornetto Trilogy. There’s a pair of zombie twins in Shaun of the Dead, while Bill Bailey plays twins in Hot Fuzz (although it’s only revealed that they’re twins near the end).
In The World’s End, Sam meets up with two twins she used to be friends with. They turn out to be robotic and fight Gary in the beer garden.
The Mermaid
Although Ariel in The Little Mermaid is nice to people, mermaids traditionally lure sailors to their deaths. In the pub, The Mermaid, Gary and the guys are seduced by siren-like robots.
Also, the fact that the Network sends two blondes and a redhead to seduce them is a callback to the earlier “marmalade sandwich” scene.
The Beehive
After former James Bond Timothy Dalton played supermarket manager Simon Skinner in the previous Cornetto movie Hot Fuzz, another Bond actor appeared in The World’s End.
Pierce Brosnan plays Mr. Shepherd, one of the guys’ old teachers. In the pub The Beehive, Mr. Shepherd explains that the Network intends to bring humanity together with an artificial hive mind.
The King’s Head
The guys go to The King’s Head after Gary King banged his head against a wall a bunch of times until blood came out to prove that he hadn’t been body-snatched by the “blanks.”
The name goes a little deeper than that, though, as this is also the pub where Gary’s personal struggles come to light.
The Hole In The Wall
The name of The Hole in the Wall is pretty self-explanatory because there’s a literal hole in the wall after Andy drives Gary’s banged-up old car “The Beast” into the pub.
There are a bunch of pubs with the name The Hole in the Wall across the UK (and one in Liverpool called Ye Hole in Ye Wall), and the term “hole in the wall” is also British slang for an ATM.
The World’s End
The most obvious foreshadowing in the pub names is the titular pub, The World’s End, where – you guessed it – the world ends. Gary and his two surviving pals, Andy and Steve, confront “The Network,” voiced by Cornetto regular Bill Nighy, and convince it to abandon its plans of world domination.
However, when the Network abandons Earth, it also brings about the end of civilization as humanity knows it and plunges society back into the Dark Ages.