TAGGED AS: comiccon, San Diego Comic-Con
The pop culture mega-event that is San Diego Comic-Con has moved entirely online this year as a result of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, allowing fans to participate from the comfort of their sofas, and every panel is being streamed across the world wide web — for free, no less. Over the next few days, we’ll be bringing you the biggest headlines to emerge from the convention — which has redubbed itself Comic-Con@Home — to keep you up to date with the most exciting developments across the TV and film industries. Today’s Thursday edition brings you highlights from the panels for The New Mutants, Amazon’s The Boys, the Star Trek universe, and a director discussion.
The cast of the Amazon superhero show The Boys got together for a Comic-Con@Home panel about the upcoming Season 2 (9/4/2020), including a look at an action-packed scene featuring The Deep (Chace Crawford) riding atop a massive whale (apparently a real prop). In addition to the returning cast members from Season 1, the panel also featured Aya Cash, who is joining the show in Season 2 as the superheroine Stormfront. Towards the end, producers Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg joined the fun to announce that Amazon has already picked up the show for a third season, although Rogen had to say, “When can we film season 3? Anyone’s guess! Hope sometime this decade.” Aisha Tyler, who hosted the panel, was also announced to be the host of a new “aftershow” called Prime Rewind: Inside the Boys, which will debut online on August 28 with a special recapping the events of Season 1.
There was definitely a “let’s just have fun with this” vibe in the Comic-Con@Home panel for Marvel’s The New Mutants, which started with a series of title cards displaying the film’s various prior release dates, beginning all the way back on April 13th, 2018. The joke ends with the announcement that the film is still slated to open on August 28th, 2020, with a “fingers crossed” caveat that comes just after a series of snarky social media posts like “The Early 20s Mutants,” “Wait, maybe The New Mutants are ACTUALLY stuck in Limbo?” and “Glad to know New Mutants will be available for my grandkids when they have their own kids.” The panel ended with a sneak peek at the first few minutes of the film, which show young Danielle Moonstar (Blu Hunt) being saved from a rampage by the supernatural monster called the Demon Bear before eventually waking up in the film’s mutant facility. In related news, The New Mutants director Josh Boone also spoke to Collider.com this week and revealed that his sequel plans (if he gets to make any) would introduce Karma and Warlock in the second movie, and adapt the Inferno crossover in the third movie. For an in-depth interview with the cast of The New Mutants, check out the video below.
Ever since Star Trek first debuted on NBC in 1966, we’ve seen hundreds of adventures in which Starfleet makes “first contact” with a new alien civilization, but fewer stories have explored what comes next. The upcoming animated CBS All Access series Star Trek: Lower Decks (8/6/2020) will not only delve into the details of what “second contact” involves (mostly lots of paperwork, it sounds like), but also, it will be the first official Star Trek TV show which is also a comedy. The Comic-Con@Home panel included two clips of the show, and also details of the setting. Star Trek: Lower Decks will be set on the U.S.S. Cerritos in the year 2380, which is after Star Trek: Nemesis, but far before Star Trek: Picard. Voice actor Jack Quaid (Ensign Boimler) also revealed that the show will at some point feature Holodeck fun. Another bit of trivia about Star Trek: Lower Decks is that it features a “Number One” voiced by Jerry O’Connell, who is married to Rebecca Romijn, who will also play a character with the same rank on Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. One of the most surprising things that happened during the panel, however, may have been the glitch that shut the panel down for many fans this morning, who surprisingly received a “content protection” message obviously not meant to apply to CBS’ own panel.
Four years after Star Trek Beyond (Certified Fresh at 86%), we still do not know for sure when and how the Star Trek franchise will return to the movies. As a TV venture, however, Star Trek has never been more active (even in the 1990s, there were only ever two shows on at once). In addition to Star Trek: Discovery (Season 3 will debut soon), Star Trek: Picard (Season 2 will probably debut in 2021), and the animated comedy Star Trek: Lower Decks (see above), other upcoming shows include Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (a spinoff set on the USS Enterprise), a series set at Starfleet Academy, a Ceti Alpha V limited series based on Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan, and a “Section 31” spinoff featuring Michelle Yeoh. Most of those shows will air on CBS All Access and are intended for generally the same audience, but we now know that, in addition to Lower Decks, there will be another new animated series called Star Trek: Prodigy that will debut on Nickelodeon in 2021. Star Trek: Prodigy will follow a group of “lawless teens… using a derelict Starfleet ship to search for adventure.” Star Trek: Prodigy is described as “an entry point for younger viewers into the franchise.” No voice cast has been announced yet, but the showrunners are Trollhunters writers Kevin and Dan Hageman.
(Photo by Comic-Con International)
Although it wasn’t part of the marketing push for any one specific movie or franchise, one of the most promising panels of the first day of Comic-Con@Home was Collider’s Directors on Directing panel, because its three members were directors Joseph Kosinski (Oblivion, Top Gun: Maverick), Robert Rodriguez (Alita: Battle Angel, Spy Kids), and Colin Trevorrow (Jurassic World). In addition to discussing broader elements of the art and craft of film directing, there was also an opportunity for each director to discuss film projects of theirs that got away, which included Kosinski’s earlier take on Ford v Ferrari and Trevorrow’s time working on Star Wars Episode IX (before J.J. Abrams took over and it became Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker). Talking about his work on Star Wars, Trevorrow capped it off by displaying a practical model of an unused redesign of a TIE fighter for the film that he designed with the help of his young son (the ship basically had longer wings that spun around the cockpit). Robert Rodriguez also briefly mentioned his next film, which will be an ensemble cast superhero movie for Netflix called We Can Be Heroes.
Thumbnail image by Amazon Prime Video
