0:381 of 1 shots sampled
1. Beat 1
Model synopsis: The beat shows a credit card for costume design and production management. No people, actions, or settings are depicted.
H. G. Wells imagines civilisation rebuilding after catastrophe, then asks whether a world governed by reason can leave room for refusal.
The war in Things to Come is not its final catastrophe but its point of departure. Once civilisation has destroyed itself, the film faces the more difficult business of deciding who should rebuild it. Its story stretches across a century, from a world consumed by war to a society preparing to send human beings into space.6 Between those worlds lies a long struggle over the surviving machinery of modern life. The movement is towards order and abundance, but the promised future brings its own contest over authority. The people who know how to make things work also expect to decide where everyone is going.
H. G. Wells adapted the screenplay from his own The Shape of Things to Come, published in 1933.2 William Cameron Menzies directed the film for producer Alexander Korda.1 The source matters because this is less a story about someone living through history than an attempt to make history itself the protagonist. Individuals embody a possibility for a time before their descendants inherit the argument. Wells’s imagined future gives the film a scale that a single lifetime could not accommodate.
Everytown is a useful name for this experiment. It makes the setting particular enough to suffer and general enough to stand for a civilisation. John Cabal, played by Raymond Massey, anticipates disaster while those around him try to preserve the ordinary pleasures of the present. Later, Ralph Richardson’s Boss rules among the ruins, treating the surviving machinery as equipment for another small war. The contrast is not simply between intelligence and stupidity. Where the Boss measures power through personal command, Cabal understands systems that can operate beyond a single territory. Their conflict turns reconstruction into a struggle over the reach of authority.
Massey returns as Oswald Cabal in the rebuilt world, making continuity of purpose almost a hereditary trait. Yet technical success does not end disagreement. The proposed launch into space provokes resistance from people who want an end to ceaseless striving. The film must confront the possibility that comfort will not produce consent. Its characters often function as advocates, with less room for the evasions and mixed motives of ordinary conversation. That quality troubled Graham Greene, whose contemporary review objected to the scenario’s characterisation, particularly its treatment of three children.8 It is also central to the film’s argument, which does not stop when the engineers have won.
The surviving film has a less orderly history than its march towards the future might suggest. The recorded running times do not establish one uncontested duration.4 A restored re-release was planned by the UK distributor Network.7 Restoration here is not a simple assurance that an original object has been recovered. The variation in length makes the identity of the version part of the viewing experience, even before questions of image quality arise.
Later circulation has included a digitally restored and colourised edition of a cut print.1 Ray Harryhausen supervised the colourisation.1 Preservation and alteration sit unusually close together here. A cleaner image need not mean an unchanged film. ITV Global Entertainment Ltd. is identified as the current copyright holder.1 That attribution does not establish whether the film’s US term was renewed. It should not be silently substituted for the narrower question addressed by this registry.
The record: Registration LP6320 by London Film Productions, Ltd is dated 4 May 1936. The registry found no renewal in the renewal volumes for 1963 to 1965, nor in the Copyright Office's records from 1978 on; on that reading the term ended on 31 December 1964 and the film has been free in the US since 1 January 1965. The record does not settle rights outside the US. Nor does it establish the completeness of any particular surviving copy.
Written 6 September 2026 by gpt-6-astra from the registry record, the atlas's own evidence and the sources below, gathered by Qwen/Qwen3.8-Max with web search and questioned by deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4-Pro. Numbered notes are the sources; a claim marked unverified has no source yet; times open the atlas at that second. How these are made and checked.
- en.wikipedia.org https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Things_to_Come
- screenonline.org.uk http://www.screenonline.org.uk/film/id/438287/index.html
- library.illinois.edu https://www.library.illinois.edu/rbx/hgwells2016/2016/09/h-g-wells-things-to-come/
- catalog.afi.com https://catalog.afi.com/Film/4300-THINGS-TOCOME
- oro.open.ac.uk https://oro.open.ac.uk/57300/1/DX093823.pdf
- imdb.com https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0028358/
- screendaily.com https://www.screendaily.com/uks-network-plans-re-release-of-restored-things-to-come/403...
- ndl.ethernet.edu.et https://ndl.ethernet.edu.et/bitstream/123456789/58685/1/9pdf.pdf
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