And behind door number 22... a guide to some music of the more traditional kind
Catherine Munn and Jacob Martin list their Top 5 programmes to watch over the festive period.
And behind door number nine... some dazzling musical delights
The complete arts guide, for week 9
Thursday of Comic-Con saw a panel of arguably the two most influential men in television, J.J. Abrams and Joss Whedon. However it seems their focus has switched (at least for the moment) to film. Abrams teased his upcoming mysterious film Super 8 (which will start shooting in September) and also talked about his 2009 film Star Trek. The two disagreed over the topic of 3-D film (I’m with Abrams here... not convinced by 3-D yet) and also discussed the ending of Lost (unsurprisingly, J.J. loved it). The biggest announcement here though, was Whedon officially declaring that he is going to be the director of The Avengers.
That leads quite neatly into talking about all of the superhero film news that came out of Comic-Con. Most importantly, The Avengers - which is set to be released in summer 2012 and already has fans super-excited without even showing any footage. There was an official cast announcement on Saturday, with the biggest news being that Mark Ruffalo is taking over from Edward Norton to play Bruce Banner/The Hulk (who’ll be the villain of the piece) and Jeremy Renner is going to play Hawkeye. Exciting teaser trailers were also shown for Thor (staring Chris Hemsworth and Natalie Portman) and The Green Lantern (staring Ryan Reynolds, Mark Strong and Blake Lively).
In addition, there was a lot of news on the TV side of things. A couple of prequels have been announced, including a Battlestar Galactica prequel (Blood & Chrome) that will depict the life of a young William Adama during the first Cylon war, a Burn Notice prequel about Sam Axe (Bruce Campbell) during his Navy SEAL days and a Spartacus: Blood and Sand prequel (Gods of the Arena) which will give some background to the story of the gladiator school before Sparty arrived to shake things up. Of course, the pilots that are airing in the US in September/October were also discussed. Mysterious thriller The Event is looking set to be the next big mythology show (check out the trailer below) and zombie show The Walking Dead could be a potential cult hit (I’m happy to say that these two are definitely going to be showing on this side of the pond too).
A trailer was shown for Zack Snyder’s 2011 film Sucker Punch, which is an action-fantasy featuring a mostly female cast (including Emily Browning, Vanessa Hudgens and Jena Malone). RED also had its first full trailer shown at Comic-Con, and I must admit I’m pretty excited about this one. RED (which stands for Retired, Extremely Dangerous) will be about a group of retired CIA agents who are forced to fight for their lives after their identities are compromised, it’s got a great cast including Bruce Willis, Mary-Louise Parker, Morgan Freeman, John Malkovich and Helen Mirren. It’s set to be released in October and I for one am definitely looking forward to it.
I love Comic-Con because it’s always the place for big announcements and news in the world of comic books and all things geek culture and this year was no different. As usual, though, despite following all of the news from the weekend I still ended up wishing I was actually in San Diego.
Thor looks epic.
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