Arthur C. Clarke showed it to Stanley Kubrick early in the development of 2001. Kubrick disliked it.

After seeing 2001, Frederik Pohl observed that the last science fiction film made with a large budget, serious intent, and a script by an actual science fiction writer had been THINGS TO COME - made in 1936. He said this in 1968.

H.G. Wells was nearly seventy years old and considered by many to be a spent force when he sat down to write a film that would predict the Second World War, the Blitz, a decades-long global conflict, the collapse of governments into warlordism, a pandemic that decimates the population, and eventually a technocratic utopia that can only be maintained by suppressing dissent. He finished the screenplay in 1934. The film was released in February 1936.

Things to Come was the most expensive British film ever made at the time, produced by Alexander Korda and directed by William Cameron Menzies, a production designer of genius who treated the entire film as an exercise in visual architecture.

Wells wrote it not as an adaptation of his 1933 book The Shape of Things to Come but as "a new story" meant to dramatise its arguments, spanning a century of imagined history from 1940 to 2036.

The actors, among them Raymond Massey, Ralph Richardson, and Cedric Hardwicke, were chosen for their magnificent diction and given speeches to declaim rather than characters to inhabit.

All of Cedric Hardwicke's scenes were reshot after Wells decided the original actor, Ernest Thesiger (you know him as Doctor Pretorius from Bride of Frankenstein), was unsatisfactory.

The aerial bombing sequence, in which planes arrive over the fictional Everytown with a sound that builds like swarming hornets, was shot in Russian-montage style and caused audiences at its premiere to laugh, because the notion that enemy aircraft could reach England still seemed absurd.

The laughing stopped four years later.