2019 Comic-Con International: San Diego

After several years of shutdown owing to the COVID-19 pandemic, San Diego Comic-Con was finally back in full swing this year, welcomed by an enthusiastic crowd of dedicated genre fans. Kicking off a full day of Hall H presentations on Thursday, July 21, was a debut look at the big screen fantasy action-adventure comedy Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, releasing March 3, 2023, from Paramount Pictures.

Actor animator film maker and comedian Seth McFarlane was wearing multiple hats at Comicon recently. He was promoting Showtime’s The Loudest Voice on which he plays Fox Network’s public relations chief Brian Lewis to Russell Crowe’s Roger Ailes.

After the success of The Terror, its Polar exploration themed historical horror anthology, AMC is unveiling a second season, a new standalone series of ten episodes which will again be produced by Ridley Scott. Titled The Terror: Infamy, the new series is set in Japanese internment camps on the West Coast where Japanese Americans were infamously imprisoned during the Second World War.

A small-town police chief goes to investigate the site of an air crash. The remote scene is one of utter devastation, but amid the rubble, chief Evans (Tolman) finds a little girl who inexplicably appears utterly unharmed, even though she is amnesiac.

All throughout San Diego Comic-Con 2019, there was a feeling of anticipation hanging heavily in the air. Some studios chose to sit out the massive pop culture and genre celebration this year, either preferring to keep their cards close to their chest or feeling better served by other avenues of promotion.

While erstwhile global smash hit Game of Thrones was somewhat busy, in the tradition of Albert Brooks, defending its life at a Comic-Con 2019 post-mortem panel, another HBO show that in many ways was passed the zeitgeist torch by its network sibling was busy holding forth on Saturday, July 20, with what was probably the most intellectually substantive and thought-provoking Hall H panel in years. Westworld fans were treated to a first look — two looks, actually, since the trailer was replayed near the end of the gathering — at the show’s third season, set to premiere in 2020 at a date yet to be determined.

Comic-Con confirmed trends: the mini is here for the season; shorts are on the rise; bright splashes of color interrupted the staples of black and white; women wore trousers – a lot; and men continued to experiment. Oh, and bell-bottoms surged.

The themes of trauma and the loss of innocence are universal, and the horror genre, of course, has historically served as a pressure release valve for the metaphorical exploration of all types of issues with which society at large is grappling. But the bifurcated structure of Stephen King’s 1986 novel It, and the unique perspective of director Andy Muschietti’s one-two horror punch makes for one of the most interesting big-screen, mainstream genre experiments in recent memory.

Having portrayed Superman three times, Henry Cavill is, of course, no stranger to Comic-Con. And he admits it’s shaped him as both a performer and a person.

Day three of San Diego Comic-Con 2019 ended with a Marvel marathon, but before that, an assortment of extraordinary beings - and the people who summon and bring them to life - did the honors at the Convention Center.