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On the heels of the latest trailer released strategically in advance of Comic-Con, Blade Runner 2049 wasn’t going to waste the opportunity to woo its hardcore fans. Enter the Blade Runner 2049 Experience, which rapidly garnered a block-long line outside of the big top erected across form the convention center.

“Imagine the raw, gritty Los Angeles of Training Day meets Lord of the Rings” - that’s how Will Smith described Bright to the HFPA journalists attending Comic-Con.   That has got to be one of the most original statements in the history of film pitches but the three-minute trailer for the $100 million Netflix “urban fantasy drama” seems to confirm precisely those elements.

Dunkirk,  the tenth feature from three-time Golden Globe nominee Christopher Nolan, focuses on one of the most dramatic events of the Second World War, when hundreds of thousands of Allied troops were surrounded on the northern French coast of the same name, and in danger of being annihilated by the Nazi army. In what was called Operation Dynamo civilian fishing boats would eventually evacuate them from the beaches of Dunkirk.

Wednesday was preview day and the last calm before the storm in San Diego with the first visitors allowed on the convention floor for an early pick of swag, mementos, and fantasy knick-knacks. Now the tsunami that is Comic-Con has finally hit in earnest as a wave of cosplayers swarmed the Convention Center, turning downtown into the usual bustling hub for alien life forms.

A Golden Globe winner and a gentleman, Colin Firth got things started on the HFPA Comic-Con lounge with an animated chat about his return as Harry Hart, the suave spy & mentor of Kingsman, now in its second outing, The Golden Circle. Directed by Matthew Vaughn once again, Kingsman: The Golden Circle gives Colin’s Hart a new disciple, Eggsy, played by Taren Egerton.

There was a preview (highly attended) on Wednesady evening, and, the next day, the doors of the massive San Diego Convention Center were open to the faithful, many of whom had been camping out for days awaiting the beginning of the annual gathering of the tribes. They were not to be disappointed.

And so it begins: as of this morning (and not counting last night’s preview), 130,000 fangirls, fanboys and media will converge in San Diego’s Convention Center for the 48th edition of Comic-Con International.  6,500 of them alone will meet several times a day in the almost-sacred Hall H, where studios, TV channels, and A-list production companies will announce and promote their movies and shows, with cast and filmmakers in attendance and exclusive clips and trailers to be shown.

Golden Globe winner Matthew McConaughey, soon to be seen on the screen as the evil Man in Black in the big-screen adaptation of Stephen King’s saga The Dark Tower, has a very close affinity to music. And that helps him in finding every character.

Dunkirk is Tom Hardy’s third collaboration with director Christopher Nolan. Following their successful work on Inception (2010) and The Dark Knight Rises (2012), they team up again on the director’s World War II drama Dunkirk in which Hardy plays a spitfire pilot.

There was no monkeying around this weekend over at Fox Studios, as summer set piece War for the Planet of the Apes took off in the US and Canada with $56. 5 million in first place.