So, it’s only the Thursday schedule they’re leaking over at the San Diego headquarters for Comic-Con, but it looks packed.

Start the day with a coffee and Click & Clack, The Tappit Brothers (only PBS would cash in on primetime Family Guy territory with an animated NPR talk show), then head over for a sneak peak at Keanu Reeves and Jennifer Connelly in a remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still, more campy source material to convert into a money maker. (Check back, we’ll be liveblogging Comic-Con 2008 when it starts, July 24.)

Read the full Thursday schedule for Comic-Con 2008 after the jump.

UPDATE: At the request of a WB publicist, we made a correction to the information below on the Dark Castle Entertainment panel.

UPDATE 2: David Glanzer from Comic-Con has left a comment below. David says: “Just a heads up that the schedule was for internal use and isn’t the “official” schedule. There are still changes to be made, so this isn’t a final.”

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• Walden Media is planning a huge blitz to promote their fall Bill Murray starrer City of Ember at ComicCon. The current plan is to “re-create the mythical city depicted in the film on a private two-car train that will transport 25 members of the media on a 2½-hour journey to the convention’s San Diego locale,” accompanied by the film’s director, screenwriter and producer.
• Expect to be inundated with “Hulk Smash!” headlines on come Monday morning. Variety kindly suggests that The Happening “will likely play like a traditional horror film rather than a broad summer title”––read: $20 million opening––leaving the by all accounts imperfect but not that bad Hulk to reel in mid-five figures.
• Sony Pictures Classics, the only studio other tha IFC to seriously stock their shelves last month at Cannes, has announced another acquisition: Palme D’or winner The Class.

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.

***A Variety story published last night partially backs up the CHUD theory for why Fox pulled out of ComicCon–ie: they couldn’t/didn’t want to tone down their R-rated material after being reprimanded for showing racy Borat footage last year–but also suggests that the studio might have had to do a reality check on their presentation’s “wow” factor. “The pics Fox wanted to promote are all f/x-intensive, with many of the money shots not yet complete.”

***Why is it okay to consistently, pejoratively use words like “doughy” to describe Seth Rogan? Would a casting item about Renee Zellweger refer to her as “the bony, squinty-eyed thesp”? Whatever–the guy’s gonna write and star in The Green Hornet.

***Gavin Hood, who won a Best Foreign Film Oscar two years ago for Tsotsi, has been hired to direct the X-men spin-off Wolverine. Variety describes the pic as an action-loaded “origin story about how Logan emerged from a barbaric experiment as an indestructible mutant with retractable razor-sharp claws.”