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Outlander’s Sam Heughan stopped by the HFPA lounge at Comic-Con to chat about the new season of the Golden Globe nominated show and we were all a bit disappointed that he didn’t show up in a glorious kilt.   The conversation, however, was very romantic in a way, since season 3 will include a lot of emotional drama and forlorn love.

Comic-Con is a zoo. It’s hot and crowded.

The weekend is near and Comic-Con 2017 is reaching the boiling point. The weather is nice and balmy this year, but the crowds are bigger, the choice of attractions and events, wider, and the stars, busier than ever.

Blade Runner 2049 easily must be the most anticipated movie of the year  - if nothing else because of the absolute cult status of its forerunner: Ridley Scott’s 1982 seminal Blade Runner. That film infused a science fiction story (based on a Philip K Dick novella) about artificial intelligence and the fundamental question of human identity with a film noir sensibility lifted from hard boiled detective movies of classic Hollywood.

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.