Cinema is filled with memorable and repeated pairings between directors and actors, but with all due respect to Scorsese/De Niro, Allen/Allen and Cameron/Paxton, the collaborations between Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg are a magic all their own. After a successful run on UK TV (that ended with Spaced) the duo unleashed two genre-hopping films that were described as parts one and two in a loose and unofficial trilogy. Shaun of the Dead melded comedy with horror while Hot Fuzz brought the laughs with an action film homage, and now the third and final film in the Blood and Ice Cream trilogy is mere months away. The World’s End follows a group of five friends who reunite and return to a small town where they last failed to complete an epic pub crawl. Convinced to try again the five discover how the years have changed them, but the bigger surprise is how something else has changed the townspeople of Newton Haven. Check out the international teaser courtesy of MSN below.

You know what? It’s really just sort of nice to see Simon Pegg and Nick Frost looking equally terrified and silly on a poster together again, and what better production for them to bring their charms to than the final entry in Edgar Wright‘s Blood and Ice Cream Trilogy, The World’s End? The new quad poster features our favorite bumbling heroes amidst a possibly intergalactic firestorm and a horde of blue-eyed baddies, but the entire thing could just consist of their dumbstruck faces and a title and we’d be sold. Wright himself tweeted out the new quad poster, and it seems like he’s about as excited for this new film as the rest of us (which is very). The World’s End opens on August 23rd. Prepare and such.

Harmony Korine and friends already gave us a taste of sand, sun and heavy weaponry, but it doesn’t quite feel like summer yet. Maybe that’s because global warming is making everything so cool or because President Obama keeps delaying all of our vacation planes, but the hugeness of the season still hasn’t fully descended. That’ll change this weekend when Iron Man 3 drops an arc reactor into theaters. Then, the parade of unbelievably massive summer movies commences with buddy cops, mischievous teens, people probably named Khan, bald Matt Damons, super men, and the end of the world itself in tow. It’s a tight race this year. Optimism runs high, and the next few months are packed full with studios and indie outfits hoping to entertain and score big, so the task of naming the 13 most-anticipated summer movies was a tough one. So instead of hurting our brains over it, we let math do the work by putting the question to the whole staff and tallying up the results. It’s a slightly eclectic mix, displaying the powerful potential of cinematic storytelling to bring us into the cool, dark room with a single light source. As luck would have it, we found a fittingly seasonal place to start:

Briefly: Focus Features has just sent around word that Edgar Wright‘s highly anticipated The World’s End, the final film in his Three Flavours Cornetto trilogy (aka the Blood and Ice Cream trilogy), has moved up from its original October 25th release date to a prime summer date of August 23rd. Penned by Wright and star Simon Pegg, the film also features Nick Frost, Martin Freeman, Paddy Considine, Eddie Marsan, and Rosamund Pike on a sprawling pub crawl that is meant to end at “fabled pub The World’s End,” but just might wrap up at the actual end of the world.  The film will now go up against other August 23rd releases The Mortal Instruments: City of Bone and You’re Next.

Many believe that the end of the Mayan calendar, which is estimated to be in December of this year, will mark the end of the world. Because those tricky Mayans had some sort of foresight that none of our modern sciences can match, right? Personally, I’d take the word of Hot Fuzz and Scott Pilgrim vs. The World director Edgar Wright over a long-dead civilization any day. So when the just-released teaser poster for his film, The World’s End, promises “Good Food, Fine Ales and Total Annihilation,” I’m inclined to believe it. 

We’ve been hearing about Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg’s next film together as co-writers for a while. A mashup between the concepts of the pub crawl and the apocalypse, The World’s End has been said to be the third film in an informal trilogy that started with Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. Other than Wright directing and co-writing the film with Pegg, we’ve also known from the start that Pegg was set to re-team with Nick Frost as its stars. But, seeing as the film’s synopsis says that it’s about five friends in their forties trying to recreate an epic pub crawl they completed when they were younger, there’s always been a question of who else was going to be joining the cast. Well, a press release put out by Universal today not only confirms a couple names that have been floating around for a while, it also adds two more to the mix.

What is Movie News After Dark? It’s a nightly news round-up that is fully prepared for the apocalypse. It watches enough movies to know what’s up. Our night begins with the iPod playlist of Omar Little. More to the point, it’s a playlist that actor Michael K. Williams designed for his character on The Wire. In order to maintain a character’s temperament, Williams often creates playlists that help keep him in the zone. Vulture has his playlist for Omar, which you can also get on Spotify. If you be comin’, that is.

What is Movie News After Dark? It’s a column about movies and stuff. With a particular focus on “and stuff.” We begin tonight with a shot of Russell Crowe as Noah, in the upcoming vision from director Darren Aronofsky. He’s looking quite grizzled, like an older version of his character from Gladiator. And that’s alright. Because that situation worked out pretty well. Then again, he also looks like a slightly older version of his Robin Hood…

According to a press release, Universal has given the thumbs up to Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost as they seek to put an end to the excellent comedy trilogy that began with Shaun of the Dead and continued with Hot Fuzz. With zombies and cops out of the way, the only thing left to heartily mock is the destruction of the planet. The World’s End is aiming to roll cameras in October. Theoretically, we could be in for a Summer or Fall 2013 release. This comes on the heels of Marvel revealing Wright’s test footage for Ant-Man at Comic-Con and announcing that it would be, you know, made at some point in the near future. They promise. Seriously. Of course this greenlight is fantastic news, but what’s most interesting (and most encouraging) here is that Universal is happy to do business with Wright again after losing money on Scott Pilgrim. It shows the kind of creative fortitude that seems rare these days. It would be too easy to dismiss a business relationship with a filmmaker, ignoring that the movie he made was brilliant simply because the box office return didn’t shine like gold. Good on ‘em for teaming up again. The team will no doubt churn out another hilarious winner.

We’re next going to see mega-talent multi-hyphenate funnyman Simon Pegg have “a fantastic fear of everything” in, uh, a film called A Fantastic Fear of Everything, but he’ll soon go on a “search for happiness” in a film called, you guessed it, Hector and The Search for Happiness (ha, fooled you!). Of course, Pegg also has both the Star Trek sequel and The World’s End lined up before that (and, oh, thank heaven for that), but this is a news piece about Search for Happiness, so here we go. News from Cannes (told you to get used to it) announces that Pegg will star in Peter Chelsom‘s (Serendipity, Shall We Dance, and yow! Hannah Montana: The Movie) film, billed as a “drama comedy” (perhaps a “dramedy”?) about a wacky London psychiatrist. Chelsom has adapted the film’s script with Tinker Lindsay from the bestselling novel by François Lelord. The film centers on Pegg’s Hector, “an eccentric yet irresistible London psychiatrist in crisis: his patients are just not getting any happier! He’s going nowhere. Then one day, armed with buckets of courage and an almost child-like curiosity, Hector breaks out of his sheltered vacuum of a life into a global quest to find out if happiness exists. More importantly, if it exists for Hector. And so begins a colorful, exotic, dangerous and hysterical journey.”

What is Movie News After Dark? This week, it is like the idiotic parents’ suburban Pasadena home in Project X. The responsible party is taking some time off, so he has handed the keys to some of us on staff, and we are having the Movie News After Dark House Party of the century. We’re doing our best to remain somewhat respectable and deliver some entertainment news you may have missed this week, but at some point we all know we’ll put a dwarf in the oven. On with the show. The first story is one you’ve likely seen already this weekend, but it’s worth repeating for the sheer joy it brings. This weekend, Movies.com published the story of George Lucas doing something we can all get behind. After decades of trying to develop land in Marin County to make the biggest movie studio in the galaxy, and with his snooty neighbors blocking the $300m a year initiative for fear of causing problems, he has decided to develop low-income housing. Finally, people can pat him on the back and forget about Jar Jar, Han shooting first and a certain crystal skull.

No time for quick puns or jokes here, just a quick sitdown to share news of a project that movie nerds everywhere have been rabid over for years – Deadline Dorset reveals that the long-anticipated third film in Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg‘s Cornetto Trilogy not only has a plot in place, but it also has a planned start date. That’s like, this year. The outlet reports that Working Title and Wright “have set a September start date for The World’s End,” which will serve as the final film of the trilogy that also includes Shaun Of The Dead and Hot Fuzz. As with the first two films, Wright will direct from a script that he’s penned with Pegg. Pegg will again star alongside Nick Frost in the film which, while total no-duh news, is so exciting to see in print that it’s a bit dizzying. The current plan is for the film to hit theaters in spring of next year, which is thrilling enough to make fans go a bit cross-eyed. Universal Pictures has not green lit the film just yet, but is “expected” to (again, duh). So what exactly is The World’s End going to be about? We’ve known that Wright and Pegg completed their script last month, but details have been scarce on its actual content. But no longer!

You might know Edgar Wright as the director of last year’s underseen screen gem Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, and you might know Simon Pegg and Nick Frost as the onscreen and screenwriting duo from the upcoming Greg Mottola comedy Paul. But probably you know them all from the work they did collaborating on the awesome action comedies Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. Those films were written by Pegg and Wright, they starred Pegg and Frost, and they were directed by Wright. And according to Simon Pegg, they’re all ready to have another go at it. He told MTV, “Edgar has coughed up that [Scott Pilgrim] furball and we’re now in the process of regurgitating [Paul], so Edgar and I are planning to get together in the next few months to start working on the next in the ‘Blood and Ice Cream’ series. And I hope Nick will be more involved in the creation of that.” So does this mean that now that Pegg and Frost have written together we may get a three-man writing team for the next, ‘Blood and Ice Cream’ movie, as he calls it?

Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg, the creative minds behind Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz are gearing up to finish what they’ve called the “Cornetto trilogy.”