Confirmed: Leave the World Behind Takes Place in the Mr. Robot Extended Universe

Courtesy NETFLIX

Read all of our Leave the World Behind coverage, including author Rumaan Alam on his family's cameo in the film, Alam's 2020 interview with GQ, director Sam Esmail's Q&A about the movie's ambiguous ending, and Esmail's Top Five Things of 2023.

Leave the World Behind, Sam Esmail’s first feature film since the success of his tech-thriller series Mr. Robot, deals with themes similar to those of his acclaimed USA Network show. But the connections may not stop there. As one keen-eyed Reddit user noted, the film references a hacking in the tri-state area that nearly led to a catastrophic meltdown at a nuclear power plant. This seems to clearly be a nod to the 11th episode of Season 4, “eXit,” in which Rami Malek’s Elliot nearly hacks a nuclear plant, with catastrophic potential damage.

The director and showrunner later confirmed the connection in a December 11 interview with The Hollywood Reporter, explaining, “It felt pretty natural, and to be honest with you, I didn’t just do it with Mr. Robot. There are little nods to everything I’ve worked on, from Homecoming and Comet to Robot. I fancy myself as creating my own little universe whenever I make a film, so I thought to myself, ‘Why not connect them all?’ It’s more fun that way.”

Screen Rant also clocked that the sinister E-Corp’s logo appears on the buckets in Kevin Bacon’s character’s truck– they’re “5/9 Emergency Kits,” a reference to the date of a cyberattack that did shut down society on the show—as well as on Roberts’ laptop, and that at one point Roberts’ character is seen reading a book called Beach Towel, a novel published by Mr. Robot antagonist Otto Irving (Bobby Cannavale) during the show’s fourth season.

Esmail is far from the first director to set his projects in a shared universe–it’s been done in the Marvel and DC canons, as well as in the work of Kevin Smith, Richard Linklater, and Quentin Tarantino—but bridging television and film adds an intriguing wrinkle. Bridging these different formats is usually reserved for franchise IP like superhero sagas or Star Wars, and it speaks to the power Esmail has within the industry. (Some more cynical Redditors have used this format for jokes, including one who sarcastically questioned how Rami Malek’s Mr. Robot character could exist in a universe that has Gilmore Girls DVDs, since Malek made his acting debut on the show in 2004—and we won’t even get into the paradoxes presented by a Julia Roberts movie in which the characters watch Friends.)

The film is based on a novel by Rumaan Alam that came out in October 2020, after the final episode of Mr. Robot aired; Esmail explained that he was already ruminating on a techno-apocalyptic film idea prior to reading the acclaimed book. “Prior to reading the book — I’m a huge fan of the disaster genre — so I had this idea percolating in the back of my head about trying to construct a sort of disaster thriller centered around a cyberattack,” Esmail told Rolling Stone. “Because I think cyberattacks — even though they’re out in the public consciousness — there’s something ominous but equally mystifying about them.”

Mr. Robot was also shot and set in and around New York City, which figures heavily into Leave the World Behind. The Airbnb house where much of the movie occurs is in Long Island, and towards the conclusion of the film the characters see New York being bombed as part of the apparent guerilla attack that seems to have caused the movie’s many technological malfunctions.

Whether Esmail continues to explore these same themes in future projects remains to be seen, though it’s entirely possible. His television update of Fritz Lang’s iconic science fiction movie Metropolis was canceled the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes, a disappointing casualty of the work stoppage that leaves Esmail’s slate more open than anticipated.

Originally Appeared on GQ