Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg built a movie on a simple, brutal joke: the apocalypse arrives, and the funniest people in Los Angeles are too selfish to survive it. This Is the End runs 106 minutes and stars its own cast as fictionalized, exaggerated versions of themselves. Rogen plays Rogen, Jay Baruchel plays Baruchel, James Franco plays Franco, and the film asks what happens when a biblical rapture catches a housewarming party mid-canapé.
The answer, per the film, is a sinkhole.
Trailer, via Sony Pictures Entertainment.
Jay Baruchel and the Convenience Store
Jay flies into Los Angeles to visit Seth. Seth drags him to Franco’s new house, where the guest list is a wall of famous names, including Michael Cera, Emma Watson, Mindy Kaling and Rihanna.
Jay hates it. He and Seth duck out to a convenience store, and the rapture hits while they are buying snacks. Blue light, bodies rising, the works. They run back to Franco’s house and find the party untouched. Then the earthquake starts.
The crowd rushes into the yard. A sinkhole opens in Franco’s lawn. Several celebrities and partygoers die in it. Seth, Jay, Franco, Jonah Hill and Craig Robinson make it back inside, where the news tells them most of the city is gone.
Rationing, Boarding Up, Waiting
The five survivors take inventory, set a ration system and board up the house. They wait for help that is not coming.
Danny McBride, who crashed the party the night before, wakes up first the next morning with no idea anything happened. He eats most of the group’s food. He does not believe their story until a man outside is killed by a creature nobody can see.
That is the engine of This Is the End. Not the monsters — the roommates.
Emma Watson Leaves With the Drinks
The group fractures fast. Jay and Seth drift apart. The others doubt Jay’s theory that this is the Apocalypse from the Book of Revelation.
Emma Watson makes it back to the house, then leaves with the group’s remaining drinks after she mishears a conversation and thinks the men plan to rape her. It is the film’s sharpest turn, and it plays as horror inside a comedy.
Craig goes to Franco’s cellar for water. The doors are locked. He meets another unseen creature and comes back a believer in Jay’s theory.
Jay and Seth dig through the floor and find water. Danny wastes most of it out of spite. The group kicks him out. On his way, Danny tells them Jay was in town two months earlier and stayed at a hotel rather than with Seth, because their friendship was already broken.
The Order the Film Moves In
The film runs through its beats in a fixed sequence, and the structure is worth seeing laid out.
| Beat | What happens |
|---|---|
| Party | Jay visits Seth, they go to Franco’s housewarming |
| Convenience store | The rapture occurs |
| Earthquake | Sinkhole opens in Franco’s yard |
| Aftermath | Five survivors ration supplies, board up |
| Morning | Danny McBride wakes up, wastes the food |
| Outside | A man is killed by an unseen creature |
| Emma Watson | She returns, then leaves with the drinks |
| Cellar | Craig finds locked doors and a creature |
| Digging | Jay and Seth find water, Danny wastes it |
| Expulsion | Danny is kicked out, reveals Jay’s hotel stay |
The Cast Plays Themselves
The premise only works because the cast agreed to be awful. Rogen and Goldberg wrote, directed and produced This Is the End as their directorial debuts, adapting their own 2007 short Jay and Seth Versus the Apocalypse, directed by Jason Stone, who executive produces here.
The film premiered at the Fox Village Theater on June 3, 2013, and opened in the United States on June 12, 2013, through Sony Pictures Releasing and its Columbia Pictures label. Mandate Pictures produced it with Rogen and Goldberg’s Point Grey Pictures.
Most of the cast appear under their own names, playing warped versions of themselves. Franco, Jonah Hill, Rogen, Baruchel, Danny McBride, Craig Robinson, Cera, Watson, Kaling, Krumholtz, Mintz-Plasse and Rihanna all take that route.
Two smaller parts are not self-portraits. Brian Huskey plays a survivor who tries to get into Franco’s house. Ricky Mabe plays one of Danny’s cannibals, dressed as Santa Claus. Jason Trost, brother of cinematographer Brandon Trost, appears uncredited as JTRO, a character he played in The FP, shown here as another of Danny’s cannibals.
What the Money and the Reviews Say
This Is the End grossed $127 million worldwide against a budget of $32–41.9 million. Reviews were generally positive, with praise aimed at the humor and the chemistry among the six leads.
That chemistry is the whole product. Take away the fact that these are real people playing warped versions of themselves and you have a standard end-of-the-world comedy with a sinkhole. Keep it, and every petty argument lands harder, because the audience knows the faces.
The film’s best idea is that the apocalypse is not the test. The test is whether Seth Rogen will choose Jay Baruchel over James Franco’s nicer house, and the movie is honest enough to make that a real question for most of its runtime. The rapture is the setup. The friendship is the plot.
Where it thins out is the middle. The rationing stretch and the cellar detour run on the same joke — somebody is selfish, somebody else is annoyed — and the unseen creatures stay unseen long enough that the threat loses weight. The film is funniest when it is specific and meanest when it is quiet, and it spends more time than it needs on the mechanics of survival.
The Emma Watson scene is the exception that proves the rule. It is the one moment where the movie’s cruelty has a target worth hitting, and it is the moment people remember.
This Is the End is a good comedy with a great premise and a soft center. It earns its laughs on the strength of its cast and its willingness to let famous people look small. It does not earn much else.
Get the Notebook.
The day's best stories and every fresh verdict, in plain English, in your inbox by seven. One email a day, no more.
