It's baaaack! Comic Con returns and the goodies start droppin'

Posted Thursday, July 24, 2014 at 4:24 PM Central

by John Couture

Today marks the official start of the San Diego Comic Con, aka SDCC, aka Comic-Con, aka The Con. It's basically a long weekend in beautiful southern California that has morphed from a pure comic book show to an entertainment extravaganza that spans television, games, movies and yes, of course, comic books.

If there was a geek mecca, SDCC would be it. As you know from past years, we don't have the funds to fly out to San Diego and cover the event (although that would be really cool and we should look into a Kickstarter for that next year) properly, but through the magic of this thing called the Internet, we can do a pretty decent job of culling all of the news that's fit to print!

Unfortunately, our coverage will be a bit hampered this year by the fact that I will be off tomorrow to close on our new house (fingers crossed), but fear not as Tim will be here all day getting you the important stuff. Hopefully, I'll be online sometime tomorrow night so that I can get you that destined to be awesome trailer for Tusk that will drop during Kevin Smith's panel tomorrow.

But where are my manners, it dawns on me that some of you might not be familiar with SDCC. If you are sitting there wondering what in the heck am I talking about, Super Comic Fun Time has you covered. They created this cool, quick video on the history of Comic-Con.

I did not know that Star Wars was the first film to invade SDCC, but I probably should have. Anyhow, as the video states, the Con has really turned into a mid-Summer event for studios to pimp their upcoming films and TV series. In other words, it's right in our wheel house.

The first day is always a bit slow as things take some time to ramp up and given the time difference, most of the good stuff won't drop until later tonight. But that doesn't mean everyone is just sitting on the left coast twittering their thumbs. Actually, they are using their thumbs to Twitter, but that's a whole other story altogether.

First up is the trailer debut of Nightcrawler. As you can see, Jake Gyllenhaal lost like 25 pounds for this role and the film is quite out there. There's really not a direct connection to SDCC, but the trailer is pretty awesome and it was released today, so... just go with it.

Now this next piece of news was definitely related to Comic-Con. It's a SDCC-exclusive poster for Ant-Man. Sure, Edgar Wright is no longer attached to the film, but that doesn't mean that this film will suck. Right?

Speaking of Comic-Con exclusive posters, Peter Jackson dropped the following poster on his Facebook page last night for The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies. He promises that this film will finally be the "defining chapter." Let's hope so, I mean at this rate, he might just use up all of the celluloid trying to get there.

This next shot has absolutely nothing to do with SDCC, but we figured that you wouldn't complain about a gratuitous shot of Anna Kendrick, Brittany Snow and the rest of the girls from Pitch Perfect 2 in the middle of a pillow fight. Pitch Perfect 2 is due out on May 15 and I meant to update this in yesterday's 2015 update, but I couldn't find any good shots. Thank you Anna Kendrick for answering my pleas (and prayers).

Finally today, this isn't so much as SDCC related as it's just plain cool. The peeps over at Adult Swim and Robot Chicken created this video about the trepidation leading up to Star Wars: Episode VII. Seth Green is one talented dude.