SDCC News Round-Up, Day 3

20 Jul

Stewart here, and welcome to another post on news coming out of this year’s San Diego Comic-Con. We got a lot of ground to cover in this post, so let’s get to it…

MOVIES!

Legendary Pictures had their big panel of goodies, and like last year, dropped a surprise or two. First though, there was some stuff regarding the upcoming Seventh Son, the new Godzilla, the sequel to 300, Rise of an Empire, the new Alfonso Cuaron astronaut peril movie Gravity, and the new Tom Cruise sci-fi actioner Edge of Tomorrow. The surprises came with director Duncan Jones bringing some preview stuff for the soon to be shooting World of Warcraft movie, and oh yeah…something about a Superman/Batman movie in 2015. I expect there will be a scene where both heroes discuss the inadvertent fatalities they’ve caused in their recent films.

While DC is still a step behind in the superhero movie front, Marvel Studios had their panel on the upcoming Thor: The Dark World and Captain America: the Winter Soldier. The other big thing in the panel was the cast and crew of Guardians of the Galaxy appearing, along with Benicio del Toro as…The Collector? Hmm, that makes me finally start wondering about that weird tease from Vin Diesel about the Marvel movies. Oh, and if that’s not enough, The Whedon (as in Joss Whedon) dropped by to let us know the working title of the Avengers sequel: Avengers 2: Age of Ultron. Oh, you had me interested before, and now you got my attention.

Guardians of the Galaxy: you will believe a raccoon can talk and fire a laser gun…in space.

Another Marvel property, X-Men: Days of Future Past, had a BIG panel Saturday with its cast and crew showing up. And by cast, apparently EVERYONE in that movie showed up. Like Hugh Jackman, Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen, James McAvoy, Jennifer Lawrence, Ellen Page, Michael Fassbender, Halle Berry, Peter Dinklage, to name a lot. Sigh, these are the moments I regret not being in San Diego.

TV!

Well, besides some final panels for shows going off the tube like Futurama and How I Met Your Mother, we had some genre shows getting some news. In Whedonverse-related news, Amy Acker is now a regular on Person of Interest, a show I have just gotten into. Also related, a reel for the upcoming second season of Arrow was shown, with Summer Glau as an evil businesswoman and…Black Canary, who isn’t Laurel Lance? Oh, I’m intrigued now. Also, it looks like we’ll be getting rid of that dopey “vigilante” moniker from last season and replacing it with…well, we’ll all see come October. Also, we got the first look at the Veronica Mars movie people dumped millions of dollars into Kickstarter to see, and…it looks good.

COMICS!

One of the big comic book panels was the 25th anniversary panel for Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman, which will be getting a new prequel miniseries very shortly. Also, there was some promotion for Marvel Comics’ big fall crossover, Infinity, which has Thanos (you know, that creepy alien you saw at the end of that end credits teaser for The Avengers) as the heavy. And DC had a talk about the Batman titles, specifically the flagship title’s big storyline “Zero Year”, which is another retelling of the origins of Batman, but considering the creative team behind it, Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo, are making some of the best Batman comics in a long time, looks to be more than just a re-hash of a already told story.