Even though some of last year’s Comic-Con secrets were leaked to the web ahead of time, the 2007 SDCC was a huge deal as far as revelations go. Whether it was the unveiling of Karen Allen’s involvement in Indiana Jones and the Then-Still-Not-Subtitled Fourth Installment or cast updates for Watchmen and Star Trek or a bit of clarification on what the hell that Cloverfield movie was, Comic-Con 2007 left us super excited and highly anticipatory for the next year of movie releases.
But after a quick glance, the 2008 convention doesn’t seem like it will have as many big announcements. There should be plenty of new footage shown from movies like Watchmen (making its second Comic-Con round) and The Spirit (hopefully there’s some better looking stuff than the most recent trailer gave us), but what secrets are set to be let out of the bag?
Here’s 10 things I hope they reveal over the next few days:
- Arnold Schwarzenegger is back in Terminator Salvation - If this really happens, I’ll be flabbergasted. But a guy can hope, at least for official word on a cameo. And there’s no better place than Comic-Con for a confirmation to happen. Well, I guess if Warner Bros. could keep it a secret until the movie opens next May, then that would actually be better. But that’s impossible nowadays.
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With Comic-con running through the weekend and finally wrapping yesterday, you probably opened your RSS reader this morning to find a seemingly endless backlogue of live blogs, Flickr streams and breathless “exclusives”. Me too — and after three hours of skimming, I’ve gleaned the following five takeaways:
1. There’s gonna be a lot of Black Sabbath in Iron Man
2. Rob Zombie might his Halloween remake a “re-imagining”, but he apparently had no interest in re-imagining the dumb-as-rails horror heroine.
3. Sorry, Robert DeNiro: you might have been forgiven for Rocky and Bullwinkle, but we will never, ever forget.
4. Beowulf could be the most Razzie-worth pile of crap since I Know Who Killed Me (more on that later today), but 100 percent of the world’s male film writers (and about 50 percent of the gals) will still give it a pass, and all because of the naked Angelina Jolie.
5. Jenna Jameson knows her way around a pun (scroll down to the part about Scarlett Johansson and “ins and outs”).
The massive Paramount panel took place at Comic-con yesterday afternoon, where the studio leaked tidbits on Iron Man, Beowulf, Indiana Jones 4, and two J.J. Abrams projects. Here’s some notes from those who were there.
According to MTV, Abrams confirmed that Cloverfield is not going to be titled Monstrous. It still *could* be titled Cloverfield. But probably not. Also, there’s a new poster, which is getting a lot of bloggy attention. While most of the chatter seems to center around the question, “What is this, a Godzilla remake?” MOVIEBOB notes that visually, the poster looks a lot like a certain photograph taken on 09/11/01:
Now, Michael Bay can get away with it when he claims that he doesn’t think of 911 when crafting city-destruction scenes because, well, Michael Bay was born without a human soul. But Abrams and company, being both human and extremely insightful about humanity, MUST have either intended the analogous gut-punch this poster provides or at least recognized it and decided it was appropriate. I’m now even more strongly thinking what I was only considering when the blurry “spy” shots of this first appeared: Is this the real key to what this mystery-movie actually is?
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Co-writers Roger Avary and Neil Gaiman introduced a reel of fully-rendered footage from Robert Zemeckis’ Beowulf last night at Comic-con, and the reviews are rolling in.
David Poland thinks it’s an Oscar contender:
It is very easy to imagine, based on this small amount of footage, that Beowulf could be a huge smash that critics can actually get behind and that it could be a serious Academy player in the way Lord of the Rings was. Though this is not a trilogy, it seems ready to break even more ground in a real way. (The issue of acting nominations was something Avery & Gaiman considered out loud in the room tonight. With big names like Hopkins, Jolie, and Malkovich, one thinks they might actually turn that trick if all the pieces come together. The great Ray Winstone, who doesn’t look like himself, might have trouble on that basis alone.)
IGN’s Todd Gilchrist says that although Beowulf relies on the same motion-capture process Zemeckis used for The Polar Express, the director seems to have avoided the major failing of that film:
The main problem director Robert Zemeckis’ Polar Express faced was its (literal) absence of life behind the CGI characters’ eyes, and Beowulf appears to have conquered this technical challenge: all of the characters act and react with a palpable sense of reality, not to mention a febrile kind of unpredictability, creating a much more authentic and evocative emotional backdrop for the larger-than-life story. Meanwhile, the general proficiency with which computer-generated imagery is rendered has evolved by leaps and bounds since those earlier films, creating an increasingly believable but nonetheless spectacularly melodramatic universe in which Beowulf’s adventures are concrete and also fantastic.
The Post Chronicle’s naked-Angelina Jolie-centric write-up is just creepy:
Brad Pitt’s lover Angie shows her sexy side once again as her naked body emerges from a dark pool of water, with little droplets of water dripping down her every curve.
The film’s trailer is now on Apple, so skip over there if these reports have made you salivate.
